What a contrast between some in the West and the Arab papers in their respective reactions to Gaza and the Hamas violence. The former blame Bush, blame the US, or blame Israel for the civil war, the latter blame the extremists in Hamas and the Palestinians themselves.

From a paper in Lebanon:  “[The Palestinians] have nearly lost their homeland, and the only ones to blame are those who wielded weapons in order to wrench it from the enemy, but have lost their way. The fedayeen have become the murderers of their own comrades-in-arms…”

From Saudi Arabia, “By means of Hamas’s takeover in Gaza, the Iran-Syria axis has managed to destroy the Mecca agreement, to sabotage the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and to block the role of Saudi Arabia, which had become the regional authority [handling] the hotspots in the [Middle East], namely Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.”

And from Egypt: “What is happening in Gaza, and the emergence of the Hamas’s Islamic emirate there, can only be described as an earthquake, and not only for the Palestinians… The impact of this Islamic emirate on our Arab world will not be like that [caused by] the emergence of the Taliban Emirate, [for] it is more dangerous, to the point where it will [threaten] Arab security.” (translations from Memri.org)

Now contrast all that with Jimmy Carter’s blaming of George Bush for the upheaval in Gaza or, say, Robert Scheer’s paean to Hamas: “By contrast, the religious zealots who later formed the Hamas organization were more focused on spiritual probity and tended far more closely to the needs of their impoverished brethren in Gaza and the West Bank. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon – and that other Iranian-backed Islamist movement, the Shiites who now control Iraq – the religious movements, both Shiite- and Sunni-based, cornered the market on purity of purpose as opposed to rank opportunism. That is precisely why these fiercely anti-Western movements have been able to turn the favorite fig leaf of U.S. neo-colonialism, the slogans of democracy and elections, against the United States by winning popular elections.” ~Victor Davis Hanson

In fairness to the Western papers, they engage in this sort of parochial criticism because they are aware that this is the sort of foreign affairs analysis that the public wants (“what’s it got to do with us?”) and this is the main sort of analysis that most American and Western journalists are interested in doing (“why should we care about it unless it impacts us?”).  Put this down to an incurious, self-absorbed public, most of which thinks “it’s all about us,” if they give it much thought, and you can also pin this on journalists who write copy that they want to see sell papers, so they write stories with the proper spin that will catch and hold the public’s interest.  How many Americans would read a headline that says, “More foreigners keep killing each other in totally inexplicable and distant conflict”?  Not many.  How many would pick the paper that says, “Civil war in Palestine; Democrats blame Bush for failure of Middle East peace process”?  Obviously, many more.  Do accuracy and perspective go out the window in the process?  Of course, but the responsibility for that lies at least as much with the public as with the papers. This stifling parochial sense that all events revolve around “us” and “we” the Americans are somehow responsible for everything that goes wrong elsewhere in the world stems from the presumption that “we” have–or should have–some role in every conflict and crisis around the world.  If that’s true, it becomes incumbent on “us” to analyse every crisis in terms of what “we” ought to do and what “we” have failed to and what “we” did wrong.  Hegemonists claim world leadership and then complain when everyone else expects them to deliver the goods, but just watch them explode at the suggestion that “we” should not be the “leaders” of the world or that other peoples in the world are responsible for their own futures. 

What Hanson seems to miss, unsurprisingly, is that the self-serving accounts from Arab papers in nearby states and the Scheer article are complementary in explaining more of the full story.  Naturally, many factions in Lebanon, secular despots in Egypt and the Saudi monarchy all have vested interests in denouncing Hamas–they would do so even if they were not allied with Washington–because Hamas represents a style of Islamic politics that threatens their own power in their own countries.  The Lebanese article faults Hamas and Fatah for fighting each other, which might be taken as not much more than a standard nationalist denunciation of fratricide.  Note the Saudi emphasis on the “Iran-Syria axis,” which is a natural villain for the Saudis to blame things on, since they already dislike and fear said axis.  It is essential, therefore, for these interested parties to detach the cause of Hamas from the cause of Palestine, since the latter still has resonance for many Arabs, and to show that Hamas has actually destroyed the chances of the Palestinians to have their own state.  That this seems to accord with the reality of the situation is a happy coincidence for these outside observers.  

Meanwhile, Scheer does not seem to be addressing responsibility for the civil war among Palestinians, but is instead explaining how Hamas gained a following and came to power.  The inconvenient reality that Hamas did come to power through elections encouraged (stupidly) by Washington cannot be harumphed away, much as Hanson might like to do so.  Scheer’s explanation of the appeal of Hamas and Hizbullah, while not exhaustive, is more or less accurate, since it was the relative lack of corruption and zeal of Hamas and Hizbullah that won them a following against the more corrupt Fatah and ineffective Arab nationalists who were unsuccessfully fighting against Israel for decades.  Hizbullah’s network of social services is a smart system of patronage that wins them loyalists and a social base that makes them that much harder to uproot and disband.  It is quite possible to describe the reality of this without saying anything good about it.  These methods have been successful in empowering these two groups–it is normally the ugliness, brutality and violence of these groups to which Westerners principally object, and not their means of retaining loyalty among their local constituencies.