More on the current war

A couple of excellent columns are available in today's edition of the Jerusalem Post. First Dore Gold, Israel's former ambassador to the UN, writes about The Middle East Terror Trail and illustrates the connection between Hamas and the rest of the Islamic terrorists. Here's a relevant excerpt:

In 2003-4, Hamas distributed a colorful poster in Jenin and Hebron featuring individual portraits of Hamas founder Yassin with bin Laden and the leaders of the Chechen mujahideen, Shamil Basayev and Khattab. The poster also refers to other battlefields of global jihad - the Balkans and Kashmir. This indicates that Hamas sees anyone fighting in global jihad as potential allies. It should not have been surprising, then, that after Israel completed its Gaza pullout, Israeli military intelligence reported that al-Qaeda cells had infiltrated from Egyptian Sinai and found a new area which would host them.

The essay is illustrated with the above poster which can be found in this article from the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

The Jerusalem Post adds the following description to the image above which is feature next to Mr. Gold's essay:

Hamas poster boys. Portraits of Yassin with Bin Laden and the leaders of the Chechen mujahideen together on a placard distributed in Jenin and Hebron.
Photo: www.intelligence.org.il

The original caption at the the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center reads:

A poster found on an propaganda and indoctrination CD distributed by Hamas. The title reads: “Chechnya, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Kashmir, Palestine and Lebanon.”

It's well worth reading Gold's entire article to grasp the connections among the various derivatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In addition today's Jerusalem Post features the excellent column The lies we tell ourselves by Caroline Click. She writes:

The main truth that Hamas's rise to power has exposed is not that Palestinian society is perhaps the most genocidal society on the face of the planet. That has been clear for all to see for the past five and a half years of the enormously popular Palestinian terror war against Israel. What Hamas's ascent to power has uncovered is that in everything related to the Palestinian conflict with Israel, the policies of the US-led international community, like the policies of the current Israeli government, are predicated on myths rather than facts.

She goes on to illustrate the myths both in Israel and the rest of the world. However, I have one criticism of her essay. Later on she writes:

...Bush was clear that democratization of the Arab world meant the embrace of freedom by Arab societies, as the US became bogged down by the terror war in Iraq, the president pretended that liberalization and the conduct of open elections were the same thing. That is, he conflated elections with democracy.

Unfortunately the confusion lies with just about everybody, not just Bush and it includes individuals such Ms. Glick. Democracy is not freedom. If words have a proper meaning and do not simply mean whatever we feel like at any given moment then democracy can mean only majority rule such as is demonstrated by the presence of free elections. The freedom which Glick hints at relies on elections in a very limited way, namely the selection of personnel. Democracy, relies on votes and the will of the people for the determination of all the important issues facing the country. What freedom actually requires is a constitutional republic. Freedom depends on the government being limited and restricted to the protection of individual rights by a proper written constitution that everybody can read and understand. The people do NOT decide every major issue, neither directly nor through representatives. In fact the most important issues, the fundamental moral principles of society, are never brought to a vote, nor were they determined by a vote. Such was the intention and for the most part the practice of the American republic at its inception, when the Founding Father's devised the most perfect system of government presently in existence. But the preservation of such a system depended on a clear understanding of what freedom consists of and unfortunately Ms. Glick's article, while valuable in many ways, illustrates that today even the best people do not have a clear understanding of liberty and its requirements.