But on Wednesday, Mr. Haniya, speaking in a relatively rare meeting with reporters from foreign news organizations at his office in Gaza City, said, "We will accept the outcome of any referendum even if it contradicts our policies and convictions".
The activists who gathered in Bournemouth this week are buoyed up by recent by-election successes, an eclectic collection of nakedly populist policies, the conviction that Iraq has done for Tony Blair and the belief that the Conservatives are in irreversible decline.The Lib Dems, in various guises, have had their share of false dawns.
Which points out a striking contrast in partisan styles: Democrats have never, in my political memory, pulled any political stunt as extreme as actually shutting down the government in defence of their policy or ideological convictions.
All cops aren't bad, but neither are all people of color pulled over and profiled by the police, and while it should be obvious that their murder is an extreme that requires change, so too does the policy that prevents convictions and consequences from befalling cops who are not doing their job, especially when a supposed routine encounter rapidly escalates and ends in death.
Williams was punished for violating the league's substance abuse policy after his conviction in August of driving while ability impaired.
If the Bush administration wants to sell a new economic stimulus package -- and its budget deficits -- it probably needed officials who could advocate the policy with more conviction.
Their hostility toward the Administration is so consuming that it leaves little room for imaginative thinking about any alternative foreign policy beyond the conviction that, to paraphrase Kerry, we should be opening firehouses in New Orleans and closing them in Baghdad.
Mr Blair's neo-conservatism, they imply, may be purer and deeper than Mr Bush's.What distinguishes the neo-con approach to foreign policy is the conviction that, by and large, democracies don't go to war with each other; and that powerful countries have both an interest and a moral duty to increase the number of democratic governments in the world.
