Debating Terror In Hamas's Backyard

I left Iraq just hours before terrorists attacked the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra. My group flew out of the country late at night on a C-130 transport plane, filled with sleepy American soldiers all wearing full combat armour and carrying weapons.

The benches on a C-130 run up and down the sides of the plane, with another pair back-to-back down the centre. That opens two aisles each about a foot wide. So you sit knee-to-knee with the soldier opposite. If you nod off, the helmet and combat vest balance each other: The weight of the helmet pushes your head down into your body, but the bulk of the vest props your chin up: It's not too uncomfortable, so long as you remain conscious enough to prevent your head from tipping to either side.

Thirty-six hours later, I arrived in the irrigated luxury of the Gulf principality of Qatar. It would be hard to imagine any place in the region that feels more removed from the dust and violence of Iraq.

Iraq is shaken almost to destruction by the hatreds and contradictions tearing apart the Middle East and the Islamic world. Qatar cheerfully walks on both sides of the street at the same time, welcoming the American fleet and an Israeli diplomatic mission--and simultaneously funding the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who justifies suicide bombings against U.S. forces and Israeli civilians, and the al-Jazeera satellite channel.

I came to Doha to participate in the Doha debates, an amazing exercise in free speech sponsored by the outspoken wife of the ruling sheikh, Sheikha Mozah. Eight times a year, the Sheikha's foundation invites four panelists from around the world to discuss all sides of issues on which most Arab societies only allow one official view. The debates are hosted by the famously fearless British interviewer Tim Sebastian and broadcast worldwide on the BBC. (The debate in which I took part can be seen this coming weekend.) They take place in the atrium of the Qatar Foundation in Doha's Education City before a live audience of university students.

The topic set before this month's panel was: "Resolved, this House believes the international community must accept Hamas as a partner." Joining me on the negative was my friend Salim Mansur of the University of Western Ontario, a regular columnist for the Toronto Sun. On the proponent side: Stanley Cohen, a radical lawyer who has defended Hamas clients accused in U.S. courts, and Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammedou, associate director of a Harvard research program.

I did not suppose there would be many anti-Hamas votes among Qatari university students, and if I had any illusions to the contrary, they were dispelled as the audience filled up with young men in white robes and head-dresses and young women in full black concealment gowns.

But the challenge before us was to speak as freely as we would at home, and accepting that challenge seemed the least repayment we could offer for the gracious hospitality of our Qatari hosts. Salim spoke eloquently of the reasons why a conscientious Muslim had to reject the terrorism and anti-Semitism of Hamas.

As for me, I had decided what I wanted to say a week before, in Baghdad. My group had been touring the American military hospital in the Green Zone when casualties began to arrive from a suicide bombing--all Iraqis, mostly civilians. The doctors hustled us out the door: They had work to do. But you did not need to see much to take away a lifetime's image of the savage wounds that extremist Islam was carving into the flesh and lives of the people of the Middle East.

With that memory in mind, I pleaded to the Qatari students: The terrorism of Hamas is aimed at Israel. But it will rebound upon you. The ideology of Hamas is the ideology that blew up the mosque in Samarra. It is the ideology that tyrannizes Iran. It is the ideology that triggered the 1994 civil war that killed between 40,000 and 100,000 Algerians.

Hamas lacks the power to destroy Israel. But the people who believe as Hamas believes hold the power to destroy places like Qatar--as they are now daily destroying Iraq.

The hope in Iraq is that the bombing of the Samarra mosque will jolt the Iraqis into stepping away from the apocalypse. It has always been up to them to choose reconstruction or civil war, and this now is perhaps the final moment of choice.

Iraq's neighbours profess sympathy. But the support that Iraq most desperately needs from those neighbours is the one thing that the Muslim Middle East will not give: a full and unequivocal repudiation of Islamist terrorism.

In Doha, the motion in favour of Hamas carried 89% to 11%. In Iraq, the motion in favour of Hamas-like terrorism is carrying a whole nation toward the apocalypse.