Palestinian elections: Abbas legitimized?

Pardon my skepticism, but I'm not sure we chalk this one up as a victory
for democracy. That's okay, the forces of freedom have had plenty of
victories lately. But this doesn't look like one of them.

First off, there's the low turnout.

Excerpt:

Palestinians initially said polls were being kept open another
two hours because of heavy turnout. Subsequently, however, officials
said the polls were being kept open to encourage turnout, which was
only about 30 percent of 1.8 million eligible voters by noon local
time (5 a.m. EST).

And then there's this

Excerpt:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Forty-six members of the Palestinian
election commission, including top managers, resigned Saturday, saying
they were pressured by Mahmoud Abbas' campaign and intelligence officials
to abruptly change voting procedures during the Jan. 9 presidential poll.

Two senior members of the commission, Ammar Dwaik and Baha al-Bakri,
resigned early Saturday, and officials later said 44 more members
resigned. Six top election officials were among those who resigned.

The resignations raised questions about Sunday's vote giving Abbas an
overwhelming victory with 62.3 percent, though the officials who quit
said the alleged irregularities did not fundamentally affect the final
vote tally.

"This proves that what happened is very serious and it must not happen
again," said Dwaik, the commission's deputy chairman. "These pressures
and threats lessened the degree of the integrity of the election, even
though overall it was free and fair."

I say:

Maybe the election's legit, and maybe it isn't. They had elections
before, in 1996. Arafat won.
Now either the elections are bogus, or the leadership in Palestine
reflects the will of the people. Either alternative reflects badly on
Palestinians as a whole.

Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) looks like a bad character. He says to the West
what the West wants to hear, but he delivers a completely different message to his constituency.

Excerpt:

Abbas earned his Ph.D. in history from Moscow's Oriental College. His
doctoral thesis denies that six million Jews died in World War II. In his
Arabic-language book "The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism"
Abbas rejects "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million
Jews were killed. The limited number that did succumb were victims of a
joint [Nazi-Zionist] plot".

Mahmoud Abbas was a founding member of the Palestinian National
Liberation Movement (Fatah) present, along with Yasser Arafat, in the
1964 beginnings of the terrorist organization dedicated to the
destruction of Israel. Since 1968 he has been a member of the Palestinian
National Council (PNC) and rose to Secretary General of the PLO Executive
Committee. The Executive Committee and the PNC are the top two
decision-making bodies of the PLO.

I say:

A Holocaust denier and co-founder of a terrorist organization. This
is what passes for a moderate with these people. Good thing we have that
security fence.

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