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Hamas Claims It Doesn't Target Civilians
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
August 23, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Speaking to Yahoo News’s Michael Isakoff in Doha,
Qatar, Hamas’s 58-year-old leader-in-exile Khaled Meshaal rejected Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comparison to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Insisting that Hamas is not a
religious group, Meshaal told Isakoff with a straight face that Hamas doesn’t
target civilians. Tell that to
Israelis blown up by Hamas suicide bombers in busses and pizza parlors during
long years of resistance against the Jewish State. Meshaal rejected ISIS’s public
beheading Aug. 19 of 40-year-old U.S. journalist James Foley on YouTube and
other Internet sites. Rejecting any
comparison to ISIS, Hamas tries hard to legitimize itself against U.S. and
Israeli terrorist accusations.
“This is an opportunity for me to say we are against killing of any civilians,”
insisted Meshaal, despite Hamas’s long history of suicide bombing in Israel.
Hamas was founded in 1987 by blind, quadraplegic Sheikh Ahmed Yassin
twenty years after the Six Day War where Israel annexed territory in Egypt’s
Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, Jordan’s West Bank and East Jerusalem and
Syria’s Golan Heights. Meshaal
likes to talk about Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian land in these
places, despite the fact that Palestinians held not one inch of sovereign land
before the 1967 Six Day War or Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. Meshaal blames Israel for killing
Palestinian civilians during its six-week long battle in Gaza where Hamas has
fired over 3,000 rockets into Israel.
“The question is who is killing civilians?” asked Meshaal, blaming
Israeli bombing for killing 15 journalists and some 2,091 Palestinians. Meshaal knows the Hamas charter
calls for Israel’s destruction, blaming “the Jews” for everything wrong in the
world.
Rejecting comparisons to the violent ISIS that’s seized large swaths of
sovereign land from Iraq, Syria and Jordan, Meshaal insists that Hamas is all
about peace and protecting civilians.
Before Israel cracked down in Gaza and built its security wall around the
West Bank, Hamas would routinely infiltrate the Jewish State to launch suicide
attacks. Admitting that Hamas
members abducted and killed three Israeli teens before the latest war began
July. 8, Meshaal justified the murders as “illegal occupation.” That’s the same
language that prompted Hamas’s military wing al-Qassam Brigades to warn all
airlines not to fly or land at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. Hamas warned
airlines about targeting commercial flights in the name of “resistance.” If they had the chance, they’d
follow Ukrainian rebels that downed Indonesian Flight MH17 July 18, killing all
298 civilians.
Meshaal likes to excuse any Hamas mass murder as justified due to
Israel’s “illegal occupation.”
Meshaal doesn’t admit that the land Palestinians occupy in Gaza and the West
Bank were never Palestinian sovereign territory.
Talking about the abductions and murder of three Israel teens, Meshaal
made no apologies. “But we
understand people are frustrated under the occupation and the oppression, and
they take all kinds of action.”
Meshaal won’t admit it’s unrealistic for Israel to engage with Hamas as long as
it’s committed to Israel’s destruction.
At other times, Meshaal concedes he has no problem with Jews as long as
they live peacefully in a sovereign Palestinian state—a bizarre fantasy but the
central lie pushed by Hamas through its Al Aqsa propaganda TV & Radio Network. Meshaal truly believes his
sticks-and-stones can defeat the world’s Sixth-ranked military
Hamas hopes it can destroy Israel by a thousand cuts or, more
importantly, by condemning the Jewish State in the eyes of world opinion. Since the latest fiasco began July
8, parts of Gaza have been reduced to rubble.
Meshaal can’t answer a simple question of why not one Arab state or
Muslim country has come to his defense.
Nor can he answer why Egypt agrees with Israel that Hamas is too violent
to end Gaza’s blockade. If Hamas
would publicly renounce violence, place its arsenal into U.N. hands, they’d
easily accomplish their goal of ending the blockade. Meshaal won’t do it because Hamas in
committed to only one thing: Destroying Israel. “Our view is that
soldiers and settlers on the West Bank are aggressors, and they are illegally
living in this occupied and stolen land.
And the right to resist is the right of Palestinians,” insists Meshaal,
completely ignoring the 1967 Six Day War.
Had a well-planned war of annihilation led by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine
Liberation Organization, Egypt’s Gen. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Syria, Jordan and Iraq
not occrred, Israel would not “occupy” spoils of the 1967 War. Israel doesn’t occupy Palestinian
land as Meshaal insists.
Palestinians occupy Israeli spoils of the Six Day War and hope to one-day use
Israel’s spoils as a future state.
Meshaal’s narrative of justifying rocket attacks or any other action against
Israel as “resistance” fails to see that Hamas doesn’t have the leverage to
achieve its objections. Netanyahu’s
perfectly content to continue pounding away at Gaza as long as Hamas fires
missiles into Israel. “We are not a
religious or violent group,” said Meshaal.
“We are fighting against aggression in our land.” Meshaal knows the history, calling
Israeli spoils of the Six Day War Palestinian land, without any proof of past
sovereignty.
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