Yeah, sorry, my "Heh" tried to indicate that we are sort of guessing/speculating, even Hass, not a slap at your credentials. I was more poking you about your statement that you have no way of verifying her claim but that you were going to ignore it anyway.
>
>> The "fact" of poor and rural
>> support for Ahmadinejad, so dear to western leftists, has been shown
>> to be a fiction. I think it should be assumed the same is true of Hamas
>> and Hezzbollah...
Well, the alleged truism that Ahmadinegad is popular among poor and rural Iranians has been complicated if not debunked. See, for example, here: <http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/ahmadinejads-rural-votes.html>
But the more general point is that you assume that Palestinians support Hamas without presenting any real evidence to back it up. Robert Naiman forwarded numbers--which you haven't addressed except to say that Fatah sucks, which is not really an argument--that showed Hamas legislative candidates would get 25% of the vote. In a country with two (sorta three) parties, those are abysmal numbers. Not sure how you extrapolate popular support out of that. Do you have anything other than anecdote and conventional wisdom to show Hamas has popular support?
Has Hamas won elections? Yep. But so have Bush and Harper. Would you say either of them have popular support? I'll anticipate your answer as being no. Then my next question would be, why are Palestinians' elected representative (and the Lebanese's, and Iranians', etc.) said to embody the aspirations of "the mass of Palestinian population" when representatives in western states never, or very very rarely, are?