This one chunk of the many National Post stories—this one written by Peter Goodspeed—about the Palestinian Islamist terrorist crisis, explains the situation more fully and interestingly than all of the long tortured minutes of deflective state-run CBC blather all day long.
…As the green flags of Hamas fluttered from the roof of the Preventative Security headquarters in Gaza yesterday, balaclava-clad gunmen belonging to the Islamist group were on the verge of taking military control of the entire Gaza Strip.
A full-scale ideological conflict that pits the secular Fatah movement against the fundamentalist Hamas now threatens to destroy Palestinian dreams of unity and statehood. A week of internecine bloodshed, which yesterday saw Hamas gunmen executing captives with shots to the head or by throwing them off rooftops, pushed one of the most densely populated places on earth toward the brink of all out civil war.
Fatah’s apparent collapse in Gaza, amid some of the worst factional fighting in Palestinian history, now raises the spectre of an Iranian-backed terrorist state on Israel’s doorstep.
At the very least, it marks a dramatic widening of Iran’s influence in the Middle East, coming just four weeks into the Lebanese Army’s inconclusive attempt to crush the pro-Syrian and Iranian-backed Fatah al-Islam gunmen in the Nahral Bared Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli.
Iran, whose president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed to wipe Israel from the map, is now the chief mentor to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Syria.
The uncertainties raised by a Hamas victory in Gaza could throw the Middle East deeper into chaos…
Caveat emptor: And if you read quality brain-building material such as this while also watching Fox News Channel at the same time as I am right now, your head may very well explode with useful information. So watch for that.
(The alternative is more unattractive: you actually get dumber with each passing second watching the state-run CBC).
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