Crimson > Hamas is the voice of the new Arab renaissance; it will spread into other Arab countries, and America will be the poorer for it unless GWB and his advisors, such comedians who pretend to be diplomats, like Dennis Ross and others of his ilk, wake and realize that Hamas if part of the new Arab dream of independence and self-respect, something Islam is all about, all the time.
Hamod is not entirely correct. Hamas can also be viewed as the Frankenstein-like creation of Israel which has turned on its maker.
tompaine.com
>>Israel has only itself to blame for the emergence of Hamas. After 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, the Israeli authorities encouraged the growth of Islamism as a counter to Palestinian nationalism and the PLO. In 1967, Israel freed Ahmed Yassin, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who founded Hamas in 1978-88, and they encouraged the Islamic right and the Brotherhood to take control of mosques and student groups. In 1977-78, the Israeli government of Menachem Begin’s Likud officially licensed Yassin’s Islamic movement and gave it official Israeli blessing. Throughout the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood fought pitched battles against the PLO. In an interview not long before he died, Arafat said: “Hamas is a creature of Israel,” and he quoted slain Israeli Prime Minister Rabin as having told him that Israeli support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood was a “fatal error.” Several U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials told me about Israel’s support for Yassin and the Brotherhood, and Chas Freeman, the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told me bluntly: “Israel started Hamas.”
Having started Hamas in the first place, various Israeli governments since the late 1980s, through two intifadas, have been struggling to cope with their deformed offspring. Yet through the dozens of suicide bombings targeting civilians perpetrated by Hamas, and through all the Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders (including Yassin), both Israeli and Palestinian extremists and revanchist demagogues have fed off each other. Each now strengthens the other.
Hamas has never had nationalist goals. Its goal is not the creation of Palestine, but the establishment of a caliphate and the restoration of pure, 7th-century Islam throughout the Muslim world. Its struggle with Israel is only a stepping stone toward that larger goal.<< |
