In recent years there have consistent attempts in the Western media to portray Hamas as just another political party.

Ahmad Ayyad, candidate No. 3 on the Islamic bloc’s slate, ran down a list of what he considered to be Abu Dis’s most pressing needs: new roads, services for women, public parks, a central slaughterhouse that would abide by health codes.

His full beard signaled his affiliation with a radical Islamic movement that rejects the existence of Israel, but Ayyad also sounded like a garden-variety grass-roots policy wonk who said he wanted to “bridge the gap between the citizens and the local authorities.”

And a year later there was this:

The mayor won a landslide victory from the inside of an Israeli jail, and still sits there today. The city banned a cultural festival from its grounds, in no small part because singing, dancing and the mixing of men and women reflects “a Western mentality.”

And yet, the budget deficit has been tamed, city employees are getting raises and more roads are being paved courtesy of the new party in power - Hamas.

In the months leading up to the 2006 Palestinian election that brought Hamas to power there were plenty of articles portraying the rejectionist, terrorist group as a bunch of good government moderates.

And yet what has happened since Hamas has come to power in Gaza?

Well Hamas has looked after its own financial well being:

The ceasefire has also been detrimental to Hamas, because the underground border traffic is one of its key revenue sources. The Islamists are believed to collect about $10,000 (€6,450) a day from the tunnel owners in the form of “usage fees,” as well as “value-added taxes” — all payable in cash to armed money collectors who wait at the tunnel exits. If a pack of cigarettes costs 74 cents in Egypt, it goes for €1.85 ($2.87) in Gaza, with half of the profits going to Hamas. And a lot of people smoke in the Gaza Strip.

The Islamists also control the distribution of gasoline. Anyone who wishes to buy gas must first buy an “insurance policy” from Hamas, for about €170 ($264), in return for a coupon that entitles its holder to buy 20 liters (5.3 gallons) once every two weeks — even now, with Israel allowing 1 million liters (264,000 gallons) of fuel for cars into the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, many residents still drive with a mixture of vegetable and used deep-frying grease. As a result, the Gaza Strip smells like a French-fry stand.

Its heavy handed politicization of medicine has led to a doctors’ strike.

The medical official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said Hamas-run security forces had started rounding up doctors and health workers and taking them to hospitals by force.

The doctors went on strike Saturday to protest the sacking of some 50 doctors and other health workers by the Hamas-run health ministry, saying the decision was politically motivated.

They’ve cracked down on the teachers’ union too:

According to the organizers, several protesters were arrested. The teachers claimed that about a quarter million students are suffering from disruptions in their studies caused by the struggle between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

The teachers, members of Palestinian Authority’s professional unions, called for the strike at the beginning of the school year in Gaza.

The unions identifying with Fatah, including the teachers and their colleagues in the medical field, are protesting what they call illegal appointments made by the Hamas government.

(h/t Solomonia)

They’ve desecrated a mosque:

CBC News recently entered what is, theoretically, a closed military area in the grim Shejaiya section of Gaza City. This was the stronghold of the Hilles clan, one of Gaza’s well-armed mafias, and it was recently the scene of the worst violence in Gaza since the Hamas takeover.

All the dead were Palestinian. Hamas used the minaret of the local mosque as a firebase in a bloody assault on the Hilles clan, many of whom are allied with the secular Fatah movement.

Eleven Hilles men were killed. Dozens of others ran for the border — the Israeli border. In a humiliating scene, wounded and terrified Hilles clansmen begged the Israelis to save them from Hamas. They were strip-searched, interrogated and treated in Israeli hospitals before being shipped to a refuge in the sweltering West Bank town of Jericho.

Not surprisingly, support for Hamas in Gaza, where they have complete control is eroding:

Someone says that Hamas is firmly in control.

“No, Hamas does not control Gaza,” she cuts in. Waving her finger, surrounded by children, she issues a challenge. “All our young men will be back. The children will grow up and fight for revenge. The most important thing is to take revenge.”

Considering the neighbourhood is full of Hamas gunmen, it’s a gutsy statement. But she is not alone in voicing opposition. In Gaza City’s market square, a crowd gathers as people pour out their own anger about the siege to the CBC crew. Essentials are in short supply, they say.

“We have no jobs, no fuel,” says one man, “and the borders are closed.”

More here.

In the meantime plenty of news organizations highlight Lauren Booth’s adventures in Gaza ignoring the tyranny of her sponsors. Though we hear comparisons to Darfur - and though Hamas supports Sudan! - there’s no evidence of mass starvation in Gaza. And yet the petty tyrannies of Haniyeh and company go largely unreported.

One would think that, in the name of due diligence, news organizations that were so keen to claim that Hamas stood for good government would want to report that the reality has not matched the promise.

Apparently keeping the illusion of a pragmatic Hamas alive is more important than exposing their corruption.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Seth Freedman as an apologist - this sounds strange, no matter what entity he is supposed to apologize for. The opposite was believed to be true - as one of the main contributors of the Guardian political cesspool called Comment is Free, he became rather prominent as an attacker. His attacks are directed against the Zionist Entity - which happens to be precisely what is expected from him by his editors and the shoal of his faithful followers that cheer him as kind of a new Guardian Messiah.

Frankly, a terrible disappointment. Some years ago, with appearance of his first articles, my friends and I had high hopes for the youngster. Not afraid to decry injustice of his own side, he was not blind to the behavior of Palestinians. No more - the guy clearly figured out which side his bread is buttered. And this side has no trek with criticizing Palestinians, obviously.
(more…)

They’ve asked the candidates the questions, and written many sneering op-eds on that yokel Sarah Palin, so I have a few questions for the media. Just to test their general knowledge of things I’ve been reading about lately.

1. How do you field dress a moose? Please be specific and tell me what kind of equipment is generally used, and why you would do so in the first place.
2. What is the Bush doctrine? Name the dates and times it was enunciated, and who was the first to describe it as such.
3. How old were you when you got your first passport? If you weren’t a reporter, do you think you would have gotten one? Be honest.
4. Do you go to church, synagogue, or any other house of religion on a regular basis?
5. If your teenaged daughter got pregnant, would you mind if your colleagues in the media investigated the story and threatened to leak it to the public? (This is mostly for nationally-known reporters; reporters from small towns can skip this question and move onto the next.)
6. Do you think all feminists must be pro-choice or they are not “really” feminists?
7. Are you a registered member of either party? If yes, which one?
8. Whom did you vote for in the past four (if applicable) presidential elections?
9. Did you contribute any money to a presidential campaign? If so, which one?
10. True or false: If you’re not voting for Obama in November, you’re a racist.
11. True or false: If you don’t think Sarah Palin is a good vice-presidential candidate, you’re a sexist.

Whoops. Looks like that’s eleven questions. But that’s okay. The media won’t be putting forth any such suggestion as the eleventh question. Because it’s not the narrative.

Click on the links to see how many reporters vote Democrat in November. (Or to learn how to field dress a moose. Being a city girl, I’ll just pass on that.)

Please hand in your responses to be graded. We will not be using a curve.

Update: Welcome, Instapundit readers. If you like this post, you’ll like the all-Sarah-Palin, all-the-time Shire Network News podcast, where my contribution is why a former Clinton/Gore/lifelong Democrat voter is going to vote for McCain-Palin.

If we go back four years and two months we learn:

Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday.

”What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the senior most levels of the Al Qaeda organization,” said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, ”We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.

Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports — apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence — referred to efforts ”to inflict catastrophic effects” before the election.

The article reports that the nature of the threat was “unspecific” leading me to believe that it never got much past the wishing stage. For some reason or another. Still, it’s incredible that there was no such chatter this year. Was there?

And we if we go back to right before the election we recall that Osama bin Laden made a rather specific threat.

The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.” [3]

Apparently, unable to strike before the elections, Bin Laden attempted to bully the American electorate into voting for John Kerry. It likely didn’t have any effect. But still remember he made a threat and never carried it out.

Jonathan Spyer has more as to what has happened to Al Qaeda since 9/11.

Al-Qaida has combined sometimes nightmarishly effective tactical ability with a somewhat other-worldly, incoherent political and strategic program. Political Islam is transforming the politics of the Middle East, and represents a key strategic challenge to the west. But the particular version of it represented by the perpetrators of 9/11 is today more of a murderous side-show than the nerve center of the future Caliphate which it likes to imagine itself.

Al Qaeda, Spyer reports, has been effective in getting its message out to like minded organizations, but operationally it has suffered numerous setback over the past seven years.

Abe Greenwald summarizes some of these losses:

Every criticism of President Bush’s national security record begins rightly with the charge that Osama bin Laden has not been captured or confirmed dead. Any honest defense of Bush must reckon with this fact. The story goes that in 2003 U.S. forces abandoned the hunt for bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan and shifted their focus onto Iraq, giving the al Qaeda leader a free pass so that we could take up arms against a regime unconnected to the attacks of September 11. Let’s put aside the fact that this is a false choice. And let’s put aside questions about the claim’s legitimacy regarding timelines, intelligence agencies, roaming fighters, Iraq’s terrorist ties, and the dynamics of force deployment, and simply accept the accusation at its most damning. To wit: Bush lost bin Laden by going into Iraq. Okay: If I were offered the choice of taking out one al Qaeda mastermind who had recently been reduced to the status of cave-dwelling spoken-word artist or more than a thousand senior al Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of armed Islamist soldiers, I would choose the latter a thousand out of a thousand times.

And the proof is in the pudding. Consider the decimated state of al Qaeda and related organizations since they’ve come up against overwhelming American force in Iraq. As CIA director Michael Hayden recently put it, we’ve seen “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally.” Would the hunt for one man in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan have yielded better results?

While Al Qaeda remains a force to be reckoned with, it cannot act as it did seven years ago. This means that whatever mistakes President Bush has made along the way, he has succeeded in the big picture. Will whoever succeeds him take the calm we have experienced over the past seven years for granted and relax his vigilance or will he remain committed to keeping the forces of the Islamists on the defensive. Osama hasn’t barked in seven years on American soil. What will it take to extend that record?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.