MARK STEYN: Hamas genie a pact with devil

As far as I know, the UN, the EU and the Arab League have not yet found a way to blame the Zionist Entity for this sort of thing. But give them another day or two.
Jamal Abu Jadian, a top Fatah commander, fled his home in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday evening, dressed as a woman to avoid dozens of Hamas militiamen who had attacked it. He and several members of his family and bodyguards were lightly wounded.
But when Abu Jadian arrived at a hospital a few hundred meters away from his house, he was discovered by a group of Hamas gunmen, who took turns shooting him in the head with automatic rifles.
"They literally blew his head off with more than 40 bullets," a doctor at Kamal Udwan Hospital said. Seasoned observers have been making droll cracks about a "two-state solution" - Hamas gets Gaza, Fatah gets the West Bank. But even that cynical jest is wishful thinking. The better bet is that the West Bank will eventually fall Hamas' way, too.
This is the logical consequence of the fraudulence of "Palestinian nationalism". There has never been any such thing. There is no evidence anywhere in the "Palestinian Authority" that anyone there is interested in building a state and running it. In conventional post-colonial scenarios of the 1960s and 70s liberation movements used terrorism as a means to advance nationalism.
By contrast, Arafat's gang used nationalism as a means to advance terrorism. With him out of the way, it was deluded to assume that the "Palestinian people" would stick with a bunch of corrupt secular socialists with little appeal to anyone other than French intellectuals and Swiss bankers. The Mahmoud Abbas types play well on CNN and in EU subsidy negotiations, but because "Palestinian nationalism" was always bogus it's no surprise that the population of Gaza would seek a real identity elsewhere.
In the Islamism of Hamas, they have found it. And, if it causes problems for all those Arab League deadbeats who promoted the pseudo-struggle of the "Palestinian people" for their own ends, well, they should have thought of that before they loosed this particular genie.
The question now is whether the Hamasification of the "Middle East peace process" will wean the Europeans off their fetishisation of the Palestinians. Don't hold your breath.
Copyright Mark Steyn