Hamas Threatens Women

In addition to the honor killings (see my earlier post) prevalent in the middle east and now spreading to Europe and the US, now Christian women in Palestine are being specifically targeted.

Christoper Hitchens draws our attention to this disturbing development in his piece "Suicide Voters: How Hamas dooms Palestine:

But the position of a non-Muslim or even non-Hamas Palestinian might soon be very unenviable also. A significant number of Palestinians are at least nominally Christian and have traditionally voted for leftist and secular parties: In recent years their centers of population in towns like Nazareth and Bethlehem have come under increasing pressure to conform to "Islamic Republic" rules. "In the Islamist Palestinian state," announced Hamas' leader Mahmoud al-Zahar before the election, "every citizen will be required to act in accordance with the codes of Islamic law." A Christmas report from Bethlehem in the Wall Street Journal made an attempt to grapple with this grievously underreported subject. It told of female Christian employees in the Bethlehem municipality who were being forbidden to greet male visitors with a handshake. It contained an interview with the leader of the Hamas group on the Bethlehem City Council, who announced his party's intention to impose the al-Jeziya as soon as it was strong enough to do so. This is the tax, sometimes called the dhimmi or "unbeliever" tax, that is levied on all those who will not profess that there is one god and that Mohammed is his messenger. Aside from the offensiveness of this, imagine the opportunities for Ottoman-style corruption that it affords.

It is shallow and short-term, therefore, to write up the election result as a bitter fruit for the Bush administration's democracy initiative. (What was the alternative? No elections? Elections but without Hamas participation? And do not forget that the combined vote for the four secular and leftist and independent lists, at a time of extreme pressure to conform to either Fatah or Hamas candidates, was over 112,000 ballots, or about a tenth of the total.) This is, rather, another stage in a process of coercive Islamization that has been going on for some time. The opposition party was already better organized than, and had almost as many guns as, the nominal Palestinian "government." It has a host of unemployed and semi-educated and well-armed young men, who will no doubt relish the task of bullying women and "unofficially" collecting the al-Jeziya revenues. Critics of the "road map" correctly pointed to the enclosure of Palestinians in ghettolike enclaves and Bantustans. Wait until you see what life looks like in a hermetic society, cut off by the Wall whose permanence this election almost certainly guarantees and subjected to Islamic rule.