(U.S. News) Mortimer B. Zuckerman - The election of a terrorist group to a majority in the Palestinian parliament is a stunning setback for Washington. The birth of a Hamas terrorist statelet will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it will threaten America's regional friends, such as Jordan and Egypt, and it will embolden all of America's enemies in the region - Syria, Iran, the Islamic insurgents in Iraq, al-Qaeda, and Hizballah. Hamastan, as they call it, will become a training ground for terrorism - a sort of Afghanistan-lite. It is critical, then, not to grant a scrap of legitimacy to Hamas under its present leadership, for to do so would undermine Palestinian moderation, and make it harder to forestall the development of terrorist training grounds in the West Bank.
2006-02-06 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive