Emboldened by the assymmetrical swap with Hizballah, Hamas wants more. "Hamas: Germany will get us a better deal on returning Schalit," by Khaled Abu Toameh for the Jerusalem Post, July 18:
In the aftermath of Wednesday's prisoner swap between Israel and Hizbullah, there are increasing calls in Hamas to replace the Egyptian mediators with German intermediaries in the talks on abducted IDF soldier St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit.
Several Hamas officials have been quoted over the past 24 hours as expressing deep disappointment with the way the Egyptians have been handling the Schalit mediation effort.
"The Egyptians have proved that they are unable to put enough pressure on Israel to accept our demands," one Hamas official reportedly said.
Another Hamas official said his movement was under the impression that the Egyptians "were on Israel's side more than on our side."
It may not be so much that Egyptians are trying to cut a great deal for Israel's sake as it is that they stand next in line after Israel to lose the most from a stronger, bolder Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has smuggled weapons continuously from the Egyptian side of the border, and has already blown open a border crossing with Egypt once. For that matter, an increase the stature of Hamas, which is itself an Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, could energize the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and add to the threat to the current regime (which, of course, is no prize either).
Of course Egypt has no intention of helping Israel. It is as implacably opposed to the permanent existence of the Jewish nation-state as any group of Arabs. But Egypt has to pretend, now and then, in order to hold onto its nearly $3 billion a year in undeserved aid from the Americans -- just look at the double game the Egyptians have been playing as they pretend to "moderate" the behavior of the Sudanese government, when what they have really been doing is running diplomatic interference for that government, allowing it to buy time as it kills more black Africans in Darfur, and drives millions out of this potentially rich area, all aided and abetted by the Egyptian government.
But it is true that Egypt does worry, for itself, not for the Israelis, about Hamas and the Gazan Arabs. No one should think, however, that Egypt actually has not been doing with Israel what it has done with the Western powers in Darfur: pretend to be a good-faith interlocutor, either with Hamas, or with the Sudan, all the while helping, to a certain extent, both. For both are fellow members of the Umma, Arab Muslims, and of course must be protected, defended, and -- where these interests do not threaten Egypt -- have their interests promoted.
I love how the brainlessly-complicit mass media calls the trading of live terrorists for dead Israelis a "prisoner exchange".
With a straight face.
Aren't "prisoners" usually alive
And can you even hold dead bodies "prisoner"?
Israel should have sent an airstrike to cap the welcome home party for the released jihadists and their happy henchmen.
Mossad = Mo, sad?
profitsbeard - I second your motion.
jimmy bones, profitsbeard - seconded.
I am conscious, as I say that, that I might be charged with being an 'armchair warrior'. Here am I, a 44 year old housewife and scholar (PhD, slightly used), who has never fired a rifle at a rabbit, nor even killed a chicken for the pot.
But I've read the tale of Orde Wingate, one of those who taught the Zionists how to fight Arab Muslims. I think Orde Wingate, were he alive today, would have advised exactly what you, jimmy and profitsbeard, have suggested. Indeed, Orde - that devout Christian and passionate advocate of the Jews' right to live in their ancestral traditional land - might well also have booby-trapped at least some of the returned bodies of dead jihadists, to be detonated by remote control for maximum effect.
There are some enemies that one must simply fight, implacably, and with whom all 'negotiations' are a snare and a delusion, unless coldly understood to be exactly that, and engaged in for precisely the same reason as the deceiving foe...to gain time.
The longer I look at the history and the texts and the contemporary practices of the Islamosphere, the more horrified I am.
Muslim antisemitism (shall we just call it, Judenhass, hatred of Jews) revolts me just as thoroughly as - when I read Leon Uris's MILA 18, as a teenager - Nazi antisemitism and the Shoah revolted me.
I see Israel standing - tiny and embattled, and at present led by the confused, the treacherous and the corrupt - taking the brunt of a major offensive of the Third Jihad, that same Third Jihad which also threatens *my* homeland and every single thing that I most love - all those things that Mr Fitzgerald lists here, over and over.
I long to see the Jews of Israel, who love and serve life, score a devastating blow against those who worship murder and adulate psychopathic sadists (was Kuntar much different from Ubul Kassim ha-Meshugga, alias Mohammed?).
Egypt has been aiding and abetting Hamas for years, playing both sides. Could smuggling have gone on and tunnels been built in Egypt had the Egyptian government and military not, at the very least, turned a blind eye?
Now Hamas will turn on its benefactors. Egyptians will get what they deserve. I'll shed no tears.
The longer I look at the history and the texts and the contemporary practices of the Islamosphere, the more horrified I am.
-by dumbledoresarmy
Current events are more than enough for me. I am disposed to write off the early history of Islam. Whether or not other civilizations evinced as much brutality almost doesn't matter. It's the past. Even the stories of the Christian excesses during the Crusades and the Muslim responses don't matter all that much. It was a different time and the map has been redrawn over and over since then.
What Muslims are doing today is more than enough for anyone who cares to look. It's easier to avert our eyes. See no evil, hear no evil and you never have to do anything about it.
There is none so blind as he who will not see.
Hamas: Egyptian negotiators too pro-Israeli; we'll see if Germany can get us a better deal for Schalit's release
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Hamas has of course been emboldened by the grotesque "prisoner exchange" it has just concluded with Israel. To even call it a "prisoner exchange"--besides the noted grotesquerie of trading living terrorists for dead soldiers--is to give Hama an unearned status as a state actor. Hama *does not* have prisoners--it has kidnap victims.
Another aspect of this--since Hamas does not consider Egypt, for its own reasons, to be a tough enough negiator with Israel, who are they now suggesting? Not another Muslim country, but *Germany*.
They obviously consider Germans to be such good dhimmis as to bully Israel into a huge release of terrorists for the return--one hopes the live return, no guarantee--of a single kidnapped Israeli soldier, Gilad Schalit.
I hope Germany proves them wrong.