Condi Rice: "Hamas...a resistance movement"

The State Department and the Bush Administration rushed to play catch-up after Condi Rice made a major gaffe and referred to Hamas as a `resistance movement'!

Talking to reporters in Berlin on January 18, Rice, discussing the situation of Palestinians in the year 2000, said, "You had Hamas, of course, sitting out as a resistance movement, not at all, by the way, involved in the politics at all."

She was comparing,in her view, the conditions for a peace settlement then versus today. Hmmmm.

A State Department spokesman said that Rice forgot to use the word terrorist, but that she was merely trying to "make a wider point" in her remarks.

Interestingly enough, Rice also had this to say in the same statement about those `former conditions'. She described then Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as someone "who had one foot in terror and one foot in politics," and the Palestinian Authority as "overrun by corruption, overrun by its ties with terrorism."

Lessee...then, the al-Aksa martyrs brigade and Force 17 were each organizations heavily involved in terrorist attacks on both Israeli civilians and Americans, and they were on Arafat's payroll. Today, they're on `moderate' Abbas' payroll, and still involved in terrorism, especially al-Aksa, who've been launching qassams at Israel and just took joint credit with Islamic Jihad for blowing up three Israelis in a bakery in Eilat.

Anything changed,Madame Secretary? Except that Abbas Arafat II wears a suit?

And that the Palestinians had a democratic election that removed the pleasant fiction that people could fund them and somehow not fund terrorist attacks against Israel?