The Wolf Comes to Dinner

We note this morning the absolute victory by Hamas in yesterday's Palestinian parliamentary elections. (Sorry to be the bearer of fantastically, head-swimmingly, world-shakingly bad news if this is the first place you're reading about it.) The WaPo notes blandly that Hamas' election would:

...severely complicate Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' policy of pursuing negotiations with Israel under a U.S.-backed peace plan known as the roadmap

Why? Because it...

...conflicts with Hamas' platform in several key respects.

What would those "several key respects" be, you may ask?

Hamas officials in Gaza City, where their victory was greatest, said the group has no plans to negotiate with Israel or recognize Israel's right to exist.

Yeah, I'd say that that's a key respect. And in case some of the WaPo's readers were just waking from an Austin Powers 40-year time capsule, the WaPo wastes ink and pixels stating that:

Europe, Israel and the United States classify Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, as a terrorist organization.

Phew! Thanks goodness for diplomatic consensus. I was confused. I thought they were the ones organizing knitting circles and potluck suppers in the church basement on Wednesday evenings. I'll give the New York Times a little more credit than the WaPo as they mustered the decency to call the Hamas victory:

a shocking upset sure to throw Mideast peacemaking into turmoil... The result could have a devastating effect on the peace process with Israel.

Well, yeah. But what's amazing is that even with those slightly stronger adjectives, the Grey Lady of Times Square still seems to live inside a world view that imagines there is a peace 'process'. That it's still all about fake Clintonesque smiles and earnest Jimmy Carter/Madeine Albright shuttles and meaningless Nobel Prizes and documents that boil down to "suckah!" In light of recent developments, that is utter delusion. When one negotiating party has made unilateral concessions and the response of the other has been to spit a kind of anti-Semitic "we'll stop at nothing less than killing you all" vitriol that even Hitler didn't think he could pull off until he'd pushed the Allies back across the English Channel, then we're waaaay past 'process'.