James Wall, the former editor-in-chief and still contributing editor of the Christian Century, comes out today as an unabashed, enthusiastic supporter of Hamas, the terrorist movement sworn to the destruction of Israel. He does so by way of mourning the fact that after the 2006 Palestinian election, Hamas was not permitted to takeover the Palestinian Authority and significantly increase the resources it had to pursue its war against the Jews. He writes:

For one brief shining moment, before the 2006 results were rewritten to fit the Zionist narrative, democracy lived in the land where Christ was born.

The “Zionist narrative” is presumably the ridiculous notion that Jews should have a homeland in which they can be secure in the face of active efforts on the part of people like Hamas to indiscriminately kill Jews.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was shocked at the election results. Israeli intelligence had assured her that Fatah would win. She had not counted on having to deal with a non-subservient Palestinian leadership.

In other words, she had not counted on having to deal with a Palestinian leadership that would want to continue and expand the war against the Jews. Failure to foresee the Hamas victory was, admittedly, a fairly shocking lapse on the part of both the U.S. and Israel, and the response was, I suspect, in large part a result of that shock and the lack of preparation for dealing with an unpleasant eventuality. No one ever said that either country’s government was perfect, or even close to it.

Israel had agreed to tolerate the election, knowing that if Hamas won, the results could easily be manipulated to fit the scenario Israel would write.

The election results were revised to fit the standard “terrorism” narrative. It works this way: When Israel does not win a war or an election, it simply rewrites the script to conform to whatever fits Israel’s preferred story line.

“Rewrites the script”? What does that mean? That Israel tries to spin the perception of events to its own advantage? Shocking! I can’t think of another government anywhere in the world that does that, can you? Or is this perhaps Wall’s way of saying that he agrees with his anti-Semitic buddies at Veterans Today that the Jews control the media, the American government, and the way the whole world sees events in the Holy Land (and they’ve been real successful in getting everyone to agree to their view, don’t you know)?

Israel could not allow Hamas to be seen as a political party that had won an election the way parties do in a democracy. Hamas had to be peddled as a “terror” organization that is a threat to world peace, a narrative pattern that continues to this day, as Israel and its US neoconservative allies pound the war drums against Iran.

So Hamas is a political party that doesn’t target civilians, doesn’t carry out suicide bombings when it can, doesn’t assassinate its political opponents or those accused of “collaborating” with Israel, doesn’t seek to smuggle arms into Gaza from Iran, in fact has no ties with Iran at all, in short is really no different from the U.S. Democratic Party or Britain’s Conservative Party. Okey-dokey.

Following Israel’s script for the next five years, Israel, the US and the European Union refused to accept the results of the 2006 election.

The U.S. and European Union, of course, are not independent government entities with their own views and interest. They are wholly owned subsidiaries of Israel, who take their orders from the Jooooos.

Immediately, Israel took over the story. Since the Hamas legislative majority had been deemed by Israel and the US to be a “terrorist” organization, all outside funding was funneled to the now minority Fatah party, which remained under Israeli control.  Cutting off the funding was intended to starve the Hamas political organization, leading to it failure.

But Hamas did not fail, not even after Israel sealed the Gaza strip.

An ongoing economic blockade and periodic military assaults on Gaza’s civilian population, in “retaliation” for home-made rockets fired into Israel by non-Hamas forces, also did not lead to Hamas’ defeat.

Right. Hamas–an authoritarian organization that doesn’t hesitate to kill its opponents and has total control of the Gaza Strip–doesn’t have any involvement in or the wherewithal to stop the shadowy “non-Hamas forces” that continue to shell Israeli civilians on a daily basis. Wall no doubt still believes in the Easter bunny, too.

Hamas simply hunkered down; its army defeated Fatah in a US endorsed civil war in which Fatah’s army was funded and trained by the US military.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Since when does a political party have an army? The answer: Hamas isn’t a political party, though it has elements that are similar. It also has a social welfare component, one that is employed in pursuit of its political goals. But the most important aspect of the Hamas operation is the military one, which is the only reason why it was able to defeat Fatah in Gaza. Can anybody guess why Israel, the U.S., and the EU might have had some hesitation to turn the military resources of the Palestinian Authority over to such an organization?

Israel became an even more isolated military fortress, threatening its neighbors and encouraging the US to come over and save the world from the deadly non-existent Iraqi WPDs [sic--I'm guessing he means WMDs]. With that successful enterprise completed, Israel turned to the nuclear threat it insists it sees in Iran.

Wall obviously needs to check a calendar, since the Iraq war started almost four years before the Palestinian election over which Wall is grieving. As for Iran, Wall is obviously skeptical of what pretty much everyone outside of the fever-swamp left agrees upon, which is that Iran has nuclear ambitions that, when combined with its bloodthirsty rhetoric against the “Zionist entity,” indicates that Israel (not to mention the rest of the world) has some reason to be worried about those ambitions.

Five years after that brief 2006 shining moment when democracy threatened to break out in Palestine, the military power that is Israel stands alone in the Middle East, a nuclear-armed behemoth that has abandoned any pretense of democracy even as it continues to cling to the fiction that it is the “only democracy” in the region.

A “brief…shining moment”: you know, when an organization that is dedicated to the destruction of its nearest neighbor, and the forcible conquest of the territory of that neighbor, and the expulsion if not killing of the Jewish residents of that neighbor from the region, was voted into power. At the risk of violating Godwin’s Law, I can’t help but compare that “brief…shining moment” of democratic action with that of January 1933. when another democratic election brought to power another regime devoted to the destruction and conquest of neighbors and the killing of Jews. Wall’s devotion to formal democracy is laudable. His enthusiasm for the terrorists who won that election is despicable.

UPDATE: For some reason, I forgot the link to Wall’s post. I’ve corrected that.