Hamas and the weak points of democracy (January 2006)
by Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi
When the exit polls during the Palestinian elections last week took for granted the victory of al Fatah, Nassif Muallem, director of the Palestinian Center for Peace and Democracy, proclaimed, “Two clear messages transpire from these elections: one for Israel and one for the rest of the world. The first one is that the Palestinian people are not terrorists, but rather peaceful people that have voted in favor of democracy. And the second messages is that we want peace.”
Following Muallem’s logic, we are, unhappily, forced to conclude with equal clarity that in light of the overwhelming victory of Hamas and the exorbitant participation at the polls, over 70% of the population, the Palestinian people must indeed be terrorists who want neither peace nor democracy. Provocative paradoxes aside, it is clear that the merits of democracy are diminished when democracy itself is used to destroy civil liberties and deny the right of existence of another nation.
We were already aware of the truth of the words of Winston Churchill who used to say that democracy was a lousy system of government, but that it was the best system we had. During his times it was democracy that brought the likes of Adolf Hitler to power.
However, following the elections won by the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut) in Algeria at the beginning of the nineties with their promise to apply the letter of the law of the Sharia to their eventual governance and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections with its ambition, equal to that of its sponsor in Iran, to eliminate the state of Israel, not only from the maps and from school textbooks, but from the face of the earth, one might ask whether “the best system we have” is good enough! As the British poet John Dryden once wrote: Nor is the Peoples Judgment always true/ The Most may err as grossly as the Few.
Sandra Giovanna Giacomazzi, teaches Government and Economics in Turin,
Italy. She is also a regular columnist for the Roman daily,
“L’Opinione della Libertà”.
giogia@giogia.com
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