17-Jun-12: From up close, the terrorists' ideology tends to take a back seat to simple hatred and greed

Understand how this Hummer H3 fits into the complex Middle Eastern conflict
and you're half way towards comprehending why the Arab/Israel
dispute is so resistant to being solved.

Small but revealing extract from "Will normality ever return? The Islamists of Hamas are being squeezed towards pragmatism" in the current edition of The Economist (hat tip to Honest Reporting):

Hamas leaders seem increasingly content to enjoy the fruits of splendid isolation. The parliamentary car park, full of rickety bangers when Hamas first took office, now gleams with flash new models hauled through the tunnels under the Egyptian border. Two Hummer H3s and a golden Porsche were recently spotted cruising the streets. Ministers and members of parliament seem unbothered by the lack of accountability as well as reports of money-laundering. “We’re hunted and targeted,” explains a self-pitying MP on Hamas’s parliamentary ethics committee, who recently spent $28,000 on a new car with the help of a $12,000 loan from the movement. Pure-minded Islamists accuse Hamas of forsaking its official name—the Islamic Resistance Movement—for the pursuit of power. Hamas has relaxed the summer religiosity campaigns that marked its first years in power and has suspended its plans to apply sharia law. Gazans mockingly call its female adherents “the 2Js”: they wear an ascetic jilbab, or nun-like cloak, for public view, but they sport skin-tight jeans underneath.

If there's only one thing to learn from this, it's that the powerful thugs of the Palestinian kleptocracy are so confident no one important (not the media, not the UN, not the ranks of their Western supporters) is ever going to see through the vicious hypocrisy of their values and their actions that they no longer bother to hide what they're doing.

Think how often you've been told about starving Gazan children and power-generating stations in Gaza that lack oil. Now make all of that fit with the sound bites that the Economist's writer throws up. Those screaming disingenuously about the 'concentration camp' conditions of the Hamas-controlled 'other Palestine' are now shown - if there was previously any doubt - to have been little more than useful idiots. The foolish/malicious Lauren Booth now has plenty of company.