Spot On

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

-- W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

We elected Hamas.

Just over four years since democratization-as-peacemaker became United States policy; more than a decade after the blood-soaked "peace process" began; and seventy-three years after the capacity of the democratic masses to choose evil should have been burned into the Western psyche, we staged a Western process in a non-Western society, and we elected Hamas.

Note the pronoun, please: we did. This is not to absolve the howling masses of the Palestinian electorate, hellbent on the annihilation of the hated Jew, for its deeds. Alone in the Middle East, they were conquered in wars of their own design, and not expelled wholesale; alone in the Middle East, they achieved some measure of prosperity and even liberty under the conquerer's heel; alone in the Middle East, they were granted self-rule by their conquerer; alone in the Middle East, they are allowed to perpetrate all manner of terror and murder against their conquerer, and still treated as a polity of more or less equal status. For all this, their bitterness and resentment festered and swelled. For all the self-pity over the Naqba and Zionism and Western manipulation, their fate is ultimately self-made.

But the responsibility for this is ultimately ours -- "us" being the democratic West and its norms as a whole. Know these things as given: The aping of democratic processes in a society immensely unsuited to it would assuredly not have happened without our intervention. The handing-over of Palestinian leadership from the Israeli administration to a terrorist cabal would not have happened without our intervention. The mindless push for democracy as a panacea for social and theological ills would not have happened without our intervention.

What, after all, is democracy but, to quote Mencken, "the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard"? Good and hard is how the Palestinians get it now: the dwindling band of Christians among them, traditionally a disproportionate font of entrepreneurialism, will dwindle further under the Islamist boot; secularism will sputter along toward its death; the women will descend further into the status of Islamist chattel; the innocent youth will be further perverted to the cause of jihad; and the erstwhile conquerer will feel ever less pity and less restraint in the just retribution for this "state's" inevitably murderous deeds.

The aim of political philosophy used to be the introduction of wisdom into governance. The Greeks of antiquity were especially concerned with t

Posted by Josh Trevino at 1:23 PM | Print this article