the world is screwed.

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I have been thinking about this all morning when I heard the news. I am saddened.

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Fatah, their main rival, wasn't much better: much the same bigotry, but tainted by Arafat's legacy of corruption and incompetence. Given their choice of two evil idiots, people will tend to choose the one with the most backbone.

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Israel will be fine with the inflow of the kerbillions in American dough.

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Israel/Palestine is so... complicated. I wish Sharon would recover completely. :/

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that was me :)

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First of all, I agree with you. However, bear in mind that this isn't all that stunning. The people of Palestine just voted into power the group that provides schools and social services for them. I'm very pro-Israel, don't get me wrong, but the American press has totally missed the kind of relationship that Hamas has set up with the Palestinian people. To them, they didn't just vote in a terrorist group. They voted out a corrupt group and decided to hand the power to the folks who were providing them with a lot of things anyway. And yes, that group happens to have an extreme political agenda.

I admit to having snickered when hearing the news reports about Bush's reactions - I suspect he'd never have even entertained the idea of democratic elections for Palestinians (which I certainly support) if he'd thought the folks he didn't like would win. *heh*

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I suspect Bush, et al, are feeling the same way about the Iraqi elections. Democracy, but not as you would have it, as we would make it to best suit our needs.
I realize that Fatah is corrupt and people are unhappy; I realize that they thought they were making the best choice for themselves and their families. It just blows my mind that a political party who holds the ideological goal of annihilating another race is the lesser of two evils. As a global civilization, have we not learned anything in the last 3000 years or so?!

@*#&@*#(@!

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Anti-Semitism is a standard feature just about all over the Muslim world: soaps, dramas, and even kids' cartoons are full of it. It's about as pervasive as the air. A bunch of Iranians in Mecca (for the haj, no less) had a little Nuremberg-style rally, with Jew-bashing rhetoric almost unchanged since 1933. One of the speakers even cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

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Not really, and it's not restricted to Palestine. I know a fair number of Americans who will say "Oh, the solution to the Middle East is just to nuke them all and turn it into a parking lot" and then pretend they're joking. But they're not, really. Yeah, they'd most of them get squeamish and start rethinking their position if handed a gun and told to do it themselves, one person at a time, but that doesn't stop them for voting for people like Bush, and worse.

We can all do our best to create civil societies, but I fear it never amounts to more than a small portion of the population really buying into it. Christianty, founded on the principle of loving your neighbor and treating him or her as you would treat yourself, has been turned by humans into an excuse to kill, murder, and steal. There isn't any proposition that humans can't turn into something vile. :-(

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