Silly them. The European Union has been engaged in multifarious ways with such "faith-based" societies since lo, about, 1973, according to Bat Ye'or's new book, "Eurabia" (Farleigh Dickinson University Press). Still, the bloc could always become more openly engaged. No more skulking around, as revealed by a recently released transcript of a secret 2002 meeting between Alistair Crooke, then a high-ranking E.U. official, and Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, subsequently assassinated by Israel in 2004. In the 2002 meeting, according to WorldNetDaily.com, Crooke blamed terrorism on "Israeli occupation," referred to Hamas terrorists as "freedom fighters," and let stand a Hamas claim that Israel was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
Crooke remains "faith-based" busy, having launched Conflicts Forum, a think tank devoted to finding common ground between jihadists and Westerners (gag). Last month in Beirut, Crooke hosted policy-interested Yanks and Brits and terrorists from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan's Jamaa Islamiyya. Said Crooke to the Lebanese newspaper, The Daily Star: "The issues of use of violence and accusations of terrorism must be addressed, of course" -- of course -- "but frontloading the process by demanding that groups be disarmed before anything else can happen is likely to fail." I wonder if he asked any of his guests to check their suicide-belts at the door.
Such spring feverishness seems contagious. Last week, the Brookings Institution and Qatar assembled 150 international notables, including a former White House adviser (Rand Beers), Euro-Islamist Tariq Ramadan, Judea Pearl (Daniel Pearl's father) and a deputy assistant secretary of state, to discuss, among other things, as the Daily Star put it, "whether and how" to include jihadist groups in democracies. Even broaching the subject has got to be encouraging to terrorists, rewarding murder and intimidation with the increasingly tawdry trappings of self-rule and international recognition. By conference's end, Islam Online, reliably or not, was trumpeting "the U.S. is ready to 'accept' the involvement of Islamist groups ... should they understand 'the rules of the game.'"
But they already do. Also this spring, at yet another convention, Hamas's Khaled Mashal declared, according to a MEMRI translation, that "tahdiah," or calm, in the Palestinian Authority was only a trick and that "resistance" would continue as long as the "occupation" (read: Israel) exists.
Some trick. Some rules. Maybe the real problem is that the West doesn't realize it's all a deadly game.