Guys... don't you think democracy might be beneficial to a group like Hamas? Remember the old quote:
Nope. I think a hail of JDAMs, Hellfires, Tomahawks and Daisy Cutters would be beneficial to a group like Hamas.
You cannot negotiate with fanatical belief-based terrorists, only eliminate them. You need to make an example of them by destroying them utterly, just as the British had to destroy the Thugee cult way back then. People will stop associating with them if association means death. The end.
Otherwise they will destroy you. They'll shake hands with you, and the other will be hiding a knife behind their back for the moment you turn around. Appeasement is seen as weakness, and will be exploited. The UK and most of Europe are learning this the hard way.
If history has proven anything, it's NEVER to trust any of the Islamist militant groups in the region.
So here's a similar historical problem:
Thuggee (or tuggee) (from Hindi thag thief, from Sanskrit sthaga scoundrel, from sthagati to conceal) was an Indian network of secret fraternities who were engaged in murdering and robbing travellers, operating from the 17th century (possibly as early as 13th century) to the 19th century whose members were known as Thugs. This is the origin of the term "thug", as many Indian words passed into common English during British Imperial rule of India.
And this was the British solution:
The Thuggee cult was suppressed by the British rulers of India in the 1830s[9], due largely to the efforts of William Sleeman, who started an extensive campaign involving profiling, intelligence, and executions. The campaign was heavily based on informants recruited from captured thugs who were offered protection on the condition that they told everything that they knew. By 1890, the Thug cult was extinct, but the concept of 'criminal tribes' and 'criminal castes' is still in use in India.[10] A police organisation known as the 'Thuggee and Dacoity Department' was established within the Government of India and remained in existence until 1904 when it was replaced by the Central Criminal Intelligence Department. The defeat of the Thuggees played a part in securing Indian loyalty to the British Raj.
Previous attempts at prosecuting and eliminating the thugs had been largely unsuccessful due to the lack of evidence for their crimes. The thugs' modus operandi yielded very little evidence: no witnesses, no weapons, and no corpses. Besides, the thugs usually made no confessions when captured. Another main reason was the fact that thug groups did not act locally, but all over the Indian subcontinent, including territories that did not belong to British India in combination with the fact that there was then no centralized criminal intelligence agency.
