Fatah goes Islamist

Western diplomats in their cowardice and ignorance cling to a false dichotomy between Islamist Hamas and "secular" Fatah. As Ido Zelkovitz explains in Middle East Quarterly, Fatah has long had religious elements in its ideology and more recently has taken a sharp and irreversible turn toward Islamism. Western diplomats and the more cowardly Israeli leaders can be expected to keep covering up this inconvenient fact in their zeal to preserve the fiction of Abbas as leading a "secular, moderate" Fatah that wants peace with Israel. To this end the Bush administration keeps financing, and providing weapons and military training, to what is actually a religious, jihadist movement with close ties to Hizballah, Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran, and Hamas itself.