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Heaven On Earth
It’s official: bright thinkers trust Hamas
In the meantime an online poll by The New Statesman, a British magazine that advertises itself as “the essential read for bright thinkers everywhere” shows that 75% of their readers think that “Hamas can be trusted.”
Well, the readers of the New Statesman are to be commended for their sang-froid and wise judgement in having been born in a relatively safe place, to a people who had no need to go live in the Middle East after 1945. Hurray for British good sense! Jolly good show, chaps.
I don’t suppose many of them would have trusted, say, the I.R.A. twenty years ago had it been elected to a majority of seats by a minority of votes in Northern Ireland…
The single reassuring aspect to all of this is that importing the first-past-the-post parliamentary voting system to the PA proves that proportional representation is a vastly preferable system. Proportional rep. probably would have produced at most a Hamas minority government, as only a minority of voters cast their ballot for the tightly-unified Hamas candidates, while the majority of voters spread their votes across a wide range of parties and candidates. The following blurb is from a piece by Gershon Baskin that appeared today courtesy of the Common Ground News Service. I recommend it to all the readers and producers of this site.
“Optical Illusion: The Hidden Results of the Palestinian Elections,” by Gershon Baskin
Analyst Gershon Baskin examines the numbers behind the official results of last week’s Palestinian election and finds that non-Hamas candidates received a clear majority of the votes over Hamas candidates. “What happened is that Hamas presented a unified list in each district while others had a multiplicity of candidates which caused great divisions. While this explanation does not alter the results of the elections, it is somewhat more comforting to recognize that the voice of the Palestinian electorate did not give a majority of support to Hamas.”
(Source: Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), January 31, 2006)
Wow.
Trusting Hamas. What a great idea….
As Ronald Reagan used to say, trust, but verify. Which is a rather polite way of saying I don’t trust you any further than I can spit.