On May 23, Ireland, Spain, and Sweden rewarded Hamas’s barbaric behavior by presenting the Palestinian Authority, which cooperates with Hamas, with one of its and Hamas’s stated political goals—international recognition. In doing so, those European leaders sent a clear message to any terrorist group—commit atrocities, take hostages, and murder innocents, including babies, and European and American progressives will give them what the terrorists claim they want.
Of course, once that stated objective is achieved, the terrorists commit further atrocities to gain their next set of rewards. U.N. bureaucrats and progressives in Europe and the United States will then seek to punish the democratic governments that respond strongly to those terrorist acts. It is a nearly 50-year pattern founded in the mistaken belief that if the terrorists get what they say they want, they will give up terrorism and join the international community of responsible players. That insanity continues despite the visible fact that rewarding criminal behavior inspires rather than deters more of it.
It’s a pattern of misguided thinking and responses to terrorism that dates back to the 1970s when, instead of punishing Yassir Arafat for the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO’s) hijackings and murders of airline and cruise ship passengers, President Jimmy Carter led the effort to reward Mr. Arafat with international political status.
That ended neither the hijackings nor Palestinian terrorism, but the increased flow of money to the PLO, whose treasury Mr. Arafat treated as a personal bank account, effectively made him one of the world’s richest men. A major portion of that aid went to funding more terrorism and of course, lined the pockets of PLO and later, Palestinian Authority officials.
Forgotten in today’s mass expressions of justifiable sympathy for Gaza’s Palestinian population, is any mention of Hamas’s diversion of millions in international aid money and material into acquiring weapons, digging tunnels, and manufacturing missiles and rockets used to attack Israel. Hamas continues to steal the bulk of the aid entering Gaza for the group’s benefit. It’s also using hostages and its fellow Palestinians as human shields. Yet, there is no condemnation or International Criminal Court (ICC) indictments directed at Hamas’s leaders for the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, or its current theft of U.N. aid parcels and abuse of Gaza’s population. Instead, progressive-minded media outlets and European leaders want to stop Israel from destroying Hamas and reward the Palestinian Authority, which compensates terrorist attackers’ and suicide bombers’ families for their “sacrifice,” with international recognition as a nation-state.
Rewarding such barbaric acts and behavior has neither reduced terrorism nor facilitated political progress in any Middle Eastern dispute. Quite the contrary, it has sustained the former and precluded the latter. A similar mindset and international support enabled Tamil terrorists to continue their deadly terrorism in Sri Lanka for more than 20 years; that is, until the government acted to defeat them once and for all. It was that punishing consequence that ended Tamil terrorism in Sri Lanka, not the cycle of talks and international rewards for the terrorists.
Three times since 2006, international pressure has saved Hamas from destruction by constraining Israel’s responses. That gave Hamas the time, funding, and confidence to launch the Oct. 7 atrocities. When will Western political leaders realize that saving Hamas once again will simply lead to its resurgence a few years hence and an even deadlier attack?
