Now that the initial shock after Hamas? victory is wearing off everybody is flexing his or her intellectual muscles to come up with a grand unifying theory as to how it happened. People like Daniel Pipes have criticized the President?s ?pothole? approach to the whole Hamas problem. According to this if the Islamists were allowed a pass into the democratic process and then get caught up in more mundane political endeavors like fixing potholes it may help to make them more docile. In fact Scott Macmillan of the Slate is of the opinion that there is some historical evidence of that in the past. This is what he says:
A sound?albeit limited?body of historical evidence supports the pothole theory. Scholars who study political Islam have long noted a tendency for Islamist movements to become more pragmatic and less violent the closer they come to gaining power. Speaking to London’s Financial Times earlier this month, an anonymous senior official in the Bush administration cited two French scholars, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, who have long noted that political Islam becomes less caustic the less it is repressed. (That the Bush administration is using the work of French academics to justify its foreign policy is an irony too rich to ignore.) In Egypt, the banned Muslim Brotherhood has donned democratic garb since President Hosni Mubarak began tolerating the group in the mid-1980s. The movement now speaks of pluralism and civil liberties, although its supporters still hate Jews, call the Holocaust “a myth,” and dismiss al-Qaida as “an illusion.” A similar shift took place in Tunisia between 1975 and 1990, when the national Islamist movement adopted more liberal positions on women’s rights and democratic reforms as the government temporarily relaxed its repression.
Let?s see what happens. Hamas is already facing a lot of international pressure where both Europe and the US have reiterated their resolve to withhold economic aid and diplomatic ties if Hamas does not renounce their anti-Israel agenda. It would be pretty hard for Hamas not to modify their stance under the circumstances. It is bend a little or break eventually for Hamas.
