David Hornik sets the stage to understand unfolding events in the Palestinian Authority: "Terror takes office." Hornik observes:

From President Carter’s support for the Khomeini regime to Israel’s creation and cultivation of the PA with President Clinton’s fervent encouragement, it’s the same story of the West tolerating, excusing, and even bolstering enemies in the hope of achieving an ideal world where one not only has freedom and comfort but never has to fight for them.

As if on cue, Jimmy Carter enters from stage left: "Don't punish the Palestinians." Carter has not a single word to say about the goals of Hamas. Not one.

In the New York Post, however, Uri Dan reminds us of "Hamas' evil face." Dan writes:

Meet the newest members of the Palestinian government: a terrorist who tried to poison Jerusalem's water supply, a murderer serving life in prison and the war-mongering mother of three suicide killers.

Palestine's new Hamas-led rulers — who include a dozen parliamentarians currently jailed for violence against Israel — reject peaceful negotiation as a way to achieve a Palestinian state.

"Jihad comes ahead of everything, including my feelings as a mother," said Mariam Farhat, 56, a new member of parliament from Gaza — and the mother of three sons who died on suicide missions against Israel.

Farhat, a gray-robed mother of 10, sent her 18-year old son to shoot up a settlement in the West Bank four years ago. The boy murdered five Israeli teens before he was killed. Farhat has boasted on TV that three of her six sons have died "martyrs."

Another incoming legislator, Mouhamad A-Tir, was once jailed for trying to poison Jerusalem's water supply. And Ahmed Sadat is still serving time for organizing the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister in 2001. Hamas wrested control of the Palestinian parliament last month by winning 74 of its seats, crushing the Fatah party, which had ruled Palestinians for four decades.

Hamas parliamentarians reacted with stony silence yesterday when President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah member, demanded that the new government maintain peace deals with Israel.

"The presidency and the government will continue to respect our commitment to the negotiations as a strategic, pragmatic political choice," Abbas told the new members. "At the same time, we must continue to strengthen and develop forms of popular resistance of a peaceful nature."

Abbas said he wanted to restart peace talks quickly.

"Let us together make peace today rather than tomorrow," he said. "Let us live in two neighboring states."

But Ismail Haniyeah, the religious Hamas leader who will likely form the new government, said, "We were elected on a different political agenda."

Jimmy Carter is the terrorists' useful idiot, the man who, Lenin to the contrary notwithstanding, wants to give (not sell) them the rope.