Hillary: Worse than clueless?

I spent three posts talking about the cluelessness of Lady Ashton and other well-meaning but ignorant Westerners who have been led to believe Arab lies over the years.

In some ways, Hillary Clinton made a statement today which is even worse.

Israel Matzav points out that Hillary Clinton said this at the AIPAC conference:

When a Hamas-controlled municipality glorifies violence and renames a square after a terrorist who murdered innocent Israelis, it insults the families on both sides who have lost loves ones in this conflict.

In a very, very narrow sense, she is right. El Bireh, the suburb of Ramallah that named a public square after Dalal Mughrabi, has a Hamas-majority city council. (So does Nablus and many other West Bank towns.)

But the naming of the square was purely a Fatah initiative and a Fatah celebration. Mughrabi was a Fatah terrorist. The entire episode was a damning indictment of Fatah - the party whose leader happens to be so-called "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas has nothing to do with it.

Which means that the US government is knowingly misinterpreting and downplaying the glorification of terrorism by Fatah.

The reason is presumably because the US government has already put itself on the line for a farce of a "peace" process that is utterly dependent on Fatah acting like mature, responsible human beings. For Hillary to admit the truth in front of a pro-Israel organization would open up the Obama administration to charges of hypocrisy and double-standards.

It is impossible to build real negotiations on a facade, and the idea that Fatah is any better or less terrorist that Hamas is exactly that. The US is so heavily invested in Fatah as a "peace partner" that it is willfully ignoring Fatah's own excesses and support for terror, instead pretending that Hamas is the only "bad guy."

This is not cluelessness. This is deception. And it is really, really ugly.