Everything You Know About Hamas is Wrong
A bit long, but worth a read.
And in case anyone refers to us as Hamas supporters, NO, we are not!
By Tim Holmes
August 21, 2014 "ICH"
--
Alright, not everything. And no, not
you, smart-arse. Still, it’s been alarming to
be reminded over the past month just how delusory
much western public conversation on Hamas is. A
common perception is that Hamas are in essence
recalcitrant fundamentalist extremists, hell-bent on
destroying Israel by any means possible. Virulently
anti-semitic, misogynist and genocidal, they use
whatever weapons they acquire to murder Israeli
civilians and perhaps even attack Western targets
internationally, without compunction or restraint.
There is little awareness in this discourse that
Hamas differ in any significant way from the
Jihadists of ISIS or Al-Qaeda.
Probably themost valuable basic text in dispelling these
delusions is Khaled Hroub’s Hamas: A Beginner’s
Guide, which takes on most of the major
confusions and misconceptions surrounding the
group’s seldom-explained ideology and modus
operandi. Hroub is a senior research fellow at
the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic
Studies as well as Director of its Arab Media
Project, and his work on Hamas is held in very high
regard: Foreign Affairs deems it
“masterful”; Columbia’s Joseph Massad calls it “the
best-researched and most objective” work on the
topic, while Harvard’s Sara Roy, a leading expert on
the Israel-Palestine conflict, calls it “excellent”
and “required reading”.
Firstly,
are Hamas anti-Semitic? Hroub’s careful answer is
that, though there have been manifold confusions in
Hamas’s writings and rhetoric between Jews, Zionists
and Israelis, Jewishness is neither a necessary nor
a sufficient condition for Hamas’s opposition. The
group draw a sharp distinction, for instance,
between “Zionist and non-Zionist” Jews:
“The
non-Zionist Jew is one who belongs to the Jewish
culture, whether as a believer in the Jewish faith
or simply by accident of birth, but … [who] takes no
part in aggressive actions against our land and our
nation … Hamas will not adopt a hostile
position in practice against anyone because of his
ideas or his creed but will adopt such a
position if those ideas and creed are translated
into hostile or damaging actions against our
people.”
non-Zionist Jew is one who belongs to the Jewish
culture, whether as a believer in the Jewish faith
or simply by accident of birth, but … [who] takes no
part in aggressive actions against our land and our
nation … Hamas will not adopt a hostile
position in practice against anyone because of his
ideas or his creed but will adopt such a
position if those ideas and creed are translated
into hostile or damaging actions against our
people.”
