THE PAST WEEK has been a good one for terrorists. The birth of the world’s first truly terrorist state in Gaza was quickly followed by a Western response that, if sustained, all but guarantees that terror state’s survival.
While there are plenty of examples, past and present, of states that encourage, fund and even practice terrorism, no nations have ever been created explicitly for the sake of terrorism. Not even the Taliban. Hamas was built upon the terrorist edifice created by the organization it recently supplanted–the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), or “Fatah” as it is has become more recently known. The PLO was created in 1964, three years before the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, not to create the world’s 22nd Arab state, but to destroy its only Jewish state. Hamas overthrew the PLO in Gaza not to change the PLO’s dream, but to fulfill it.