Matt Zeitlin

Via Daniel Levy’s sweet new blog, Propects for Peace, comes this nytimes article, showing that in the midst of the Hamas-Fatah conflict in the Gaza and the violence in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, we have Al Qaeda type jihadists seeping in:

Palestinian authority, both in the Palestinian areas and in refugee camps in Lebanon and beyond, used to lie in the hands of Fatah, the nationalist faction once led by Yasir Arafat. But after the entry of militant Hamas into politics, its 2006 electoral defeat of Fatah and the battles between them, jihadi freelancers with murky links are filling a vacuum in Gaza and in the camps in Lebanon.

Now, Hamas has a pretty fundamentalist line on Islam and isn’t exactly overly friendly with Israel, so why should the emergence of more violent jihadists in Gaza particularly worry us? Well, Hamas, being a real political organization with constituents to keep happy can probably be pressured or negotiated with over some things, these murky jihadists…not so much. Hamas, however, is the group with the most to lose from the emergence of such groups, and probably could go into some sort of covert cooperation with the Israelis over trying to eliminate the jihadists in their midst. Levy puts it best:

al-Qaeda and Hamas are not the same thing and to lump them together makes not only for bad analysis, but also for bad policy – plus, the kind of political Islamic movements represented by Hamas may be the last line of defense before we see the proliferation of an even more powerful al-Qaedist threat. And for the umpteenth time, no, this does not turn Hamas into a bunch of lovable teddy bears. The world is more complex than good guys vs. bad guys. More often than not, sensible political alliance-building has to be with imperfect inhabitants of a broad grey area.

Of course, with a Republican president, a party built upon destroying nuance while fighting terrorism, this disticntion is unlikely to be made. For the Norman Podhoretz types, Hamas and AQ are just both “islamofascists” despite the numerous conflicts between the two groups. This of course is in intentional ignorance of, say, Iran supporting the fight against AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Conservatives don’t seem to notice the cognitive dissonance when they say that Iran is being nefarious in supporting the Mahdi Army and the Shia in thier attacks on Sunni while at the same time bleating that Ahmandinejad and bin-Laden are both “islamofascists.” If they’re killing eachother, then they’re probably not sharing the same ideology, and America needs to deal with different groups in different ways. Then we have Mitt Romney:

This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate.

Ok, Hamas wants an Islamic Palestinian government where Israel and the Territories are, Hezbollah is a front for Iran that wants Shia representation and government in Lebanon, AQ is a Sunni group wants a world-wise caliphate, and the Muslim Brotherhood is mostly a Sunni Islamist movement most active in Egypt. This may not be relevant to Romney’s remarks, they’ve also RENOUNCED VIOLENCE, so they’re not exactly terrorists. But in GWOT, such distinction are irrelevant, even when these groups criticize and occasionally kill each other’s members.