It may seem like an absurd question, but I recently participated in a FrontPage symposium about an article by Fawaz Gerges in The Nation about how Hamas was doing just that. Here is an excerpt:
In a recent article in The Nation, titled "The Transformation of Hamas," Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges argues that Hamas is ready to accept Israel and to become a moderate and democratic force if it is engaged properly by the U.S. and the West.
What reality is there to this proposition? Today Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss the supposed "transformation" of Hamas. Our guests are:
Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.
P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva, Israel, and a frequent contributor to Frontpagemag.com and Pajamas Media.
and
Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. His latest book is The Complete Infidel's Guide to the Koran. He is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America.
[Editorial note: I emailed Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges several times to invite him to join this discussion, but my invitations went unanswered.]
FP: Kenneth Levin, David Hornik and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Kenneth Levin, tell us your thoughts on Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges's article. Is Hamas truly ready to embrace Israelis? This means they are ready to abolish Article 11 of their Charter, which is the sole purpose for their existence. This is a bit confusing. What’s your angle?
Levin: Thanks Jamie.
Gerges’s article is simply pro-Hamas propaganda; it is shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda. Unfortunately, this has become standard fare for pieces touching on Israel in the pages of The Nation.
The Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel’s annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter’s declarations. Just recently, senior Hamas figure Osama Abu Khaled shot down claims of any moderating of the organization’s goals and asserted that its objective remains Israel’s destruction. In addition, Hamas-controlled schools and children’s television continue to indoctrinate their young audience in the virtues of devoting themselves to the murder of Jews.
Gerges supports his stance by citing Hamas statements in the vein of being prepared to accept an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. But Hamas leaders have repeatedly explained that they view any such “acceptance” as an interim step on the path to eliminating Israel. The same is true with regard to Hamas’s willingness to enter into truces. While Gerges asserts that this too is evidence of the organization’s “moderating,” Hamas has made clear that it views truces as vehicles to facilitate its strengthening its own forces until it is in a better position to pursue Israel’s annihilation.
In expounding his thesis, Gerges makes much of other indirect “evidence” as well, “evidence” as meaningless as the examples cited.
Among his other claims, Gerges asserts that the task of governing Gaza and satisfying the needs of its people is one of the factors pushing Hamas to moderation. This has for almost a century been a recurrent – and empty – line of argument proffered by apologists for despotic, murderous regimes. Many were the voices in 1933 that declared Hitler’s rise to the position of chancellor in Germany and his need to govern the nation would inevitably push him to moderate his murderous objectives.
In a similar vein, Gerges cites Hamas’s violent confrontations with other Islamist groups in Gaza as additional evidence of its moderation. Of course, these confrontations are no more than struggles for dominance among competing parties.
After the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when Hitler, apparently fearing a potentially competing power base, had Ernst Roehm and other leaders of the Nazi Sturm Abteilung, the SA, murdered, numerous voices in the West chose to interpret the move as Hitler’s eliminating Nazi extremists and as evidence of his own moderating.
Having established, to his apparent satisfaction, Hamas’s “political evolution and deepening moderation,” Gerges then gets to his predictable conclusion: The real problem is not Hamas and its genocidal agenda but Israel – which, Gerges suggests, is the true “hardline” and “extremist” party in the conflict. The key obstacle to peace is Israel and its refusal to make the concessions that would free Hamas to go public with its new moderation and allow it to follow its heart and abandon more explicitly its goal of killing all Jews.
This is what passes for serious discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict in The Nation and likeminded anti-Israel outlets.
FP: Robert Spencer, what do you make of Gerges’s article and Kenneth Levin's comments? And I would like you to expand on this idea that Hamas would or could somehow stray from Islamic orthodoxy regarding Jews and territories that are considered to belong to the House of Islam.
Spencer: Jamie, Kenneth Levin is entirely correct, and his observations are important. Gerges's article is indeed, as Levin says, "simply pro-Hamas propaganda...shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda." And it is crucial to bear in mind that "the Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel's annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter's declarations."
Of course, in contrast to this, Gerges insists that "there are unmistakable signs that the religiously based radical movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel." But not even Gerges could bring himself to assert that there have been any signs at all, subtle or not, that Hamas has changed its uncompromising posture on Islam, and that makes all the difference. For as long as Hamas remains a group committed to what it regards as Islamic purity, it also remains committed to the Islamic principle that land that is considered to have once belonged to the dar al-Islam belongs by right to the dar al-Islam forever. It remains committed to the idea that, as the twentieth-century Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi put it, non-Muslims have "absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God's earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines." If they do, "the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life."
This means that if Hamas remains an Islamic group, it remains committed to the destruction of Israel. The strategy that Hamas may pursue in order to attain this goal may change enough to deceive Fawaz Gerges or, if he is in on the joke, then the readers of The Nation, but the goal remains the same.
It is also important to note in light of Gerges' article that Hamas also, insofar as it continues to be an Islamic religious party, also believes in the acceptability of deceiving unbelievers, particularly in wartime. This is based on a hadith in which Muhammad says that lying is permissible in war, and others in which he says "war is deceit." Also, Qur'an 3:28 warns Muslims not to take unbelievers as "friends or helpers" (َأَوْلِيَا -- a word that means more than casual friendship, but something like alliance), "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them." This is a foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for "guard" in the Arabic is tuqātan (تُقَاةً), the verbal noun from taqiyyatan -- hence the increasingly familiar term taqiyya. Ibn Kathir says that the phrase given above as "unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them" means that "believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers" may "show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda' said, 'We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.' Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, 'The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'"
While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi'ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi'ites, "it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur'an 3:28." The Sunnis of Al-Qaeda practice it today.
It is much more likely that Hamas is practicing taqiyya in appearing to accept the existence of Israel and being willing to negotiate, than that they have actually abandoned Islamic doctrine on these matters.
FP: Thank you Robert Spencer.
There is much more. Read it all.
Just curious but how did you all discuss this topic while laughing?
My vote goes 100% to "al-taqiyya." Make that 101%.
The Arabic word "taqiyya" literally means "covering" or "concealment," i.e. deliberate lying to the Infidel about Islam.
When I first learned about al-taqiyya several years ago, so much was instantly explained to me. In short, - they lie.
Sorry, but hamas is not humus.
You can add garlic, cayenne, a splash of Tabasco, parsley, fava beans, and creamy tahina...
to humus
but not to hamas.
Why do our policymakers get confused?
Here's all you need to know about hamas:
חָמָס (hamas - noun)
robbery, theft, evil-doing
חָמַס (hamas - verb)
to rob, to oppress ; (Jewish law) to rob with violence
-------
You see, it's all spelled out in BLACK and WHITE
From article...Is Hamas softening its stance and warming toward Israel?
How soft is soft?
From WND...JERUSALEM – Iran has increased exponentially its training of Hamas gunmen both in the Gaza Strip and abroad, a senior Egyptian security official told WND.
The official said Iran believes there will be a confrontation with Israel this year over Tehran's nuclear facilities and has thus stepped up training of Hamas, whose gunmen will be instrumental in carrying out retaliatory attacks against the Jewish state during any future war.
SEYMOUR: "Just curious but how did you all discuss this topic while laughing?"
I have great respect for Jamie Glazov, but I also wondered why such a distinguished panel would be asked to squander their time and energy making offerings on such a (non)issue/question.
Just curious:
Would anyone here turn their back on a well known psychopathic killer?
The Saidian Fawaz Gerges -- he apparently is unaware that Ibn Warraq and Robert Irwin, and others too, have demolished Said for all time, and his jobs-program for his own kind (wasn't it Hamid Dabashi who in his tearful "Ode to Edward Said" noted that Said had made possible that such people as he, Hamid Dabashi, could get jobs in Western universities -- how true that is, and was, and that is one reason for the dismal state of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies in so many, though not all, Western universities, and the counter-attack, the pushback, is on its way)-- is the kind of man only Avi Shlaim, and Irene Gendzier, and others of that ilk could possibly admire. But Gerges is a tireless self-promoter, and has presented himself not only to the obvious willing collaborators, such as the late unlamented Peter Jennings (he who was so fond of Hanan Ashrawi, though his later taste ran to the wives of cancer-ridden former colleagues), but to others, as an acceptable "moderate" spokesman, or even, comically, as a "scholar of Islam." No, Schacht and Snouck Hurgronje were scholars of Islam. The late Alfred Premare was a scholar of Islam. Hans Jansen is a scholar of Islam. He, Fawaz Gerges, is not a scholar of Islam, but an apologist for Islam and a promoter of the worldview that comes naturally to, that is part of, Islam. And those who put their trust in him will or already have come a cropper.
The self-promoting and oily Fawaz Gerges, “analyst” for television news programs, is the embodiment of the very worst of the academic hustlers. It is delightful to discover, however, that at least he has left Bronxville and Sarah Lawrence (and with the death of Peter Jennings, his ABC deal is apparently off), for pastures new, at the London School of Economics, a place where Donald Watt, Elie Kedourie, and Kenneth Minogue once walked, and now it’s the likes of Fawaz Gerges and Fred Halliday, the first a sly apologist for Islam, the second a Trotsykite (who, however, at least does not care for Islam).
It would be fun to run through the various claims made by Fawaz Gerges at the website of Fawaz Gerges. For example, that "doctorate" from Oxford. You may think this is a full-fledged Ph.D., but a D.Phil. requires only an extended essay, a thesis, and no courses, and for Arabs, getting a D.Phil, at St. Antony’s, which had been turned into a virtual diploma-mill for them (Rashid Khalidi is one of their grateful beneficiaries) is a D.Phil. -- a thesis but no courses -- and I am certain he must have gotten it, as Rashid Khalidi did, from that diploma-mill for Arabs that the late Albert Hourani ("dispensing," J. B. Kelly used to say, "his favors like a fat abbot"), St. Antony's College (Middle Eastern wing). And that Carnegie grant -- well, thanks to the sentimental Vartan Gregorian, the Carnegie has been flinging grant money at Muslim scholars and Brave Young Muslim Reformers And Thinkers -- it's all futile and phony, and keeps missing the point, and the money had best be spent on Iranians trying to de-Islamize Iran, or on supporting the works, and the translations of works, by apostates from Islam -- and I see that Gerges, with his list of "media appearances" that you can find at his website, is a dab hand at the grant-getting game. His work is worthless as a guide to Islam. But who cares? He's writing books, and listing those books, and those articles, and doing opinion pieces, and for all I know consulting with Western governments on “terrorism” and how to diminish the numbers of “violent extremists” by reaching out to them, so that they will change their methods (but their goals? What changes about their goals?) and altogether busy busy busy is Mr. Fawaz Gerges, who is well-satisfied with most things and, in his imitation of Mr. Podsnap, above all other things, with himself.
Here's a story about Fawaz Gerges: About seven years ago an Egyptian apostate living in the United States was faced with the threat of deportation. He was desperate. His lawyer contacted Fawaz Gerges to see if he would write a letter to the court, on behalf of this man, explaining that if forced to return to Egypt he would be in danger. Fawaz Gerges said he would be willing to write such a letter, which might have taken a half-hour to write -- but only if he received, for that letter, $5,000. The Egyptain client of the lawyer did not have that kind of money; what became of him I do not know. But I do know what that story tells the world about Fawaz Gerges, and so do you.
Here, nonetheless, is a little more about this hero of our time, Fawaz A. Gerges, as impressively described at the website of Fawaz A. Gerges:
Portrait of Fawaz A. Gerges
Fawaz A. Gerges is a professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He earned a doctorate from Oxford University and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gerges has taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Columbia, and was a research scholar at Princeton and chairholder (the Christian A. Johnson Chair in Middle Eastern Studies and International Affairs) at Sarah Lawrence College, New York.
His special interests include Islam and the political process, mainstream Islamist movements and jihadist groups (like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda), Arab politics and Muslim politics in the 20th century, the international relations of the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, state and society in the Middle East, American foreign policy towards the Muslim world, the modern history of the Middle East, history of conflict, diplomacy and foreign policy, and historical sociology.
Gerges is author of two recently acclaimed books: Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt Press, 2007), and The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge University Press, 2005). The Washington Post selected The Far Enemy as one of the best 15 books published in the field. Journey of the Jihadist was on the best-selling list of Barnes and Nobles and Foreign Affairs Magazine for several months.
Gerges has been the recipient of a MacArthur, Fullbright and Carnegie Fellowships and his books, including America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests? (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Superpowers and the Middle East: Regional and International Politics (Oxford and Westview), have been translated into a number of foreign languages.
No armchair historian, Gerges was recently a Carnegie Scholar, who has just returned from the Middle East after completing a fifteen-month field study in the region. He has interviewed hundreds of civil society leaders, activists, and mainstream and radical Islamists in the Muslim world and within Muslim communities in Europe.
Now he is writing a book tentatively titled "The Making of the Arab World: From Nasser To Nasrallah."
His articles and editorials have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Independent (London), Al Hayat (London), Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Middle East Journal, Survival, Al Mustqbal al-Arabi, Middle East Insight, and many others.
Gerges has given scores of interviews for various media outlets throughout the world, including ABC, CNN, BBC, PBS, CBS, NPR, CBC, Al Jazeera, and LBC. He has been a guest on The Charlie Rose Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Bill Moyers Journal, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, ABC Nightline, World News Tonight, This Week, Good Morning America and other prominent shows. He was a senior ABC television news analyst from 2000 until 2007.
Yeah sure, they're warming up like this: Riots over Israeli claim to West Bank heritage sites.
Or like this: Iran to ban airlines not using the term 'Persian Gulf'.
Or like this: Fatah meets rivals Hamas in Gaza.
They all have something in common: Taqiyya, threats, deceit, and violence, all in the name of their malicious cult of Allah. That's how it is in the Islamic nation of Hammas, dedicated to Article XI - the destruction of Israel and genocide of the Jewish people.
Taqiyya is the Islamic equivalent of retreat or conceding defeat. Hamas knows that there is nothing they can do militarily to hurt Israel. They will put on their nice faces and offer a hand in friendship, biding their time with a knife in the other. Once their position has strengthened they will return to their old ways. How is this not obvious to Western policy makers? I know they're old enough to remember the shyster, Yasser Arafat.
You'd have to be a small child or an utter moron to take Hamas at face value.
Actually I'd like to take that back. "Conceding defeat" isn't the right term. "Strategic withdrawl" is more like it.
Is Hamas softening its stance and warming toward Israel?
NO
Cornelius: It is in fact kind of weird to spend so much time on something so obvious. Perhaps for the general public, who will never see this; but for anyone with any familiarity with the topic, Nakal's response is all one needs.
Hi Robert and all of you Jihadwatch followers, as I promised last week, here is the second article of "blogging the Qur'an" translated in French. You can find it here
http://www.avraidire.eu/2010/02/bloguer-le-coran-sourate-1-%e2%80%9cle-prologue%e2%80%9d-ou-%e2%80%9cl%e2%80%99ouverture%e2%80%9d/
Also I have started to publish a fantastic translation of "the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam" with some chapters already available, you can find it here
http://www.avraidire.eu/category/islam/robert-spencer-islam/le-guide-politiquement-incorrect-de-lislam-robert-spencer-islam-islam/
Bonjour à Robert et à vous tous lecteurs de Jihadwatch, comme promis la semaine dernière, voici le deuxième article dans la série "bloguer le Coran", traduction en français de la série "blogging the Qur'an" écrite par Robert Spencer.Vous pouvez le trouver ici
http://www.avraidire.eu/2010/02/bloguer-le-coran-sourate-1-%e2%80%9cle-prologue%e2%80%9d-ou-%e2%80%9cl%e2%80%99ouverture%e2%80%9d/
J'ai aussi commencé à publier des traductions d'un livre de Robert Spencer, "le guide politiquement incorrect de l'Islam", vous pouvez déjà trouver quelques chapitres en français ici
http://www.avraidire.eu/category/islam/robert-spencer-islam/le-guide-politiquement-incorrect-de-lislam-robert-spencer-islam-islam/
Once again, feel free to share the news using social networks buttons available on my blog to educate as many people as you can on Islam, especially the french speakers. I will publish another one next week,in the meantime, enjoy!
Antoine Martin
The self-promoting and oily Fawaz Gerges, “analyst” for television news programs, is the embodiment of the very worst of the academic hustlers.
NO, sad to say Noah Feldman is WORSE. The epitome
of a neo-Leftist cum-perverse-pseudo-Jew dilettante
attorney masquerading as an intellect (and not very well)...
Feldman wants to be the Kaballah to the Muslims, the
one 'iconoclastic' Jew that breaks through the Muslim
fold. Gerges might be a close second. I admit to a particular bias against cross-overs who try to go native with the enemy; to me this is worse than a native who is already an inherent threat. Thus we have the self-hating minyan of Feldman, Chomsky, Finkelstein, Landis (the U Oklahoma Jew-Ba'athist), etc. as well as the Christian
Arab defenders of Islam that started with Said and Hourani
(and the peripatetically ugly sell-out Helen Thomas).
"NO, sad to say Noah Feldman is WORSE. The epitome
of a neo-Leftist cum-perverse-pseudo-Jew dilettante
attorney masquerading as an intellect..."
Noah Feldman is an utter and complete Jewish Jackass.
A disgrace to Judaism. A Submitter to the Islamic Barbarians that HATE Jews.
When I saw Fawaz Gerges on TV for the first time some years back it didn't take me long to know what he was -- an apologist for Muslim extremists who by misdirection seeks to blow smoke in the eyes of the ignorant media who eagerly seek his brilliant "analysis". His academic observations are elaborate lies upon lies, and he knows they are lies. Anyone who knows the subjects he is discussing knows he is a smooth liar. For him to say that Hamas is ready to accept Israel is not a surprise. It's a bait-and-switch. Get the U.S. to develop ties with Hamas; Hamas will never accept Israel, but getting Hamas accepted as a legitimate party by the U.S. is the whole point. And the Left continues its wishful self-hypnosis with Muslim trancemasters such as Fawaz Gerges.
My translation of Hamas' current behaviour:
The Israelis gave Hamas and co. such a b****y good a**-kicking in Gaza in January 2009 that they [Hamas] are still licking their wounds and need more time to regroup and rearm.
My great regret about Gaza 2009 is that the rest of the free non-Muslim world did not have the brains to leave well alone and let the Israelis get on with it. The best outcome would have been Gaza flattened a la 1940s Berlin (every mosque demolished - they were all being used as war bunkers and/ or arsenals), Hamas leadership winkled out of their hideyholes or blown up therein, most Hamasniks dead in battle, all surviving Muslims evicted into Egypt, the remnant Christian residents (only about 3000 people) given the option of migrating to the West or remaining as citizens of Israel [said Arabised Christians to be pointedly reminded that in *any* Islamic state they are and can only ever expect to be despised and persecuted dhimmis, whereas in Israel they would have civil rights within a modern democracy], and the Gaza Strip absorbed into Israel, permanently.
A few quotes from Gerges' "Journey of the Jihadist" :
"Muslims are also impressed by Islamists' incorruptibility, as well as their ability to expose the incompetence and failings of secular regimes. They put their [?!] money where their mouths are. Hamas, for instance, helps the widows of suicide bombers and provides daycare, healthcare, and early schooling for the children of the very poor." (p.10)
And no doubt helps little old ladies cross the road by avoiding the IEDs.
And without apparent irony, this gem:
"Mamy Muslims have expressed rage at the accusation that their mosques promoted violence." (pp.10-11)
Well, Feldman's shtick, the one that got him such attention from The Times, , was that of the Orthodox Jewish boy who -- mirabile dictu -- was an "expert" on Islam. I don't why that was regarded as so amazing. From Ignaz Goldziher on, many of the most celebrated Western scholars of Islam have been Jews.
But Noah Feldman is not at anything like the level of Goldziher, or any of the great scholars of Islam. He fits right into the class of those who become "Guardians of the Two Noble Sanctuaries" Professors, fits right in to MESA (MESA Nostra). He falls within the perfectly-acceptable, as a miscomprehending apologist for Islam, and he has received the backing -- which tells you all you need to know -- of John Esposito. At Harvard Law School, there was no one to adequately warn, no one such as Bernard Lewis who might have kept the faculty from making such a dismal appointment, and now he's there, and few there are willing -- save privately -- to admit to a great error, now that they know more about Islam.
Feldman surely must realize that his writing on Islam, though it got him where he is today, does not hold up and now invites ridicule from the discerning. Think of the very title of one of them -- "After Jihad." He's re-fashioning himself. This is not new, nor unique to those who uttered nonsense about Islam. For example, there were quite a few enthusiasts for the Chinese Communists, and some even for the Cultural Revolution, who then managed to have their previous enthusiasms overlooked or ignored, so that they could find safe haven in academic life. I'm thinking of such an example as Orville Schell, who became the Dean of the School of Journalism at Berkeley. I can just imagine what Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), the great Sinologist and scholar of modern China (one of his students was Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia) would make of the orville-schells of this world. Perhaps someday Simon Leys will make a list, check it twice, and let them all have it, seriatim.
Unimpressed informants at Harvard Law School report that Feldman is understandably refashioning himself as a "scholar" of American Constitutional Law and is letting the word get out that that was always his main interest. I don’t think he will be laying out for his classes anytime soon all the ways that the Shari’a flatly contradicts, in spirit and letter, the Constitution of the United States, nor how the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights guts, in all the important ways, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He’s out too far and in too deep. And it’s the onward unchecked march of the career that matters. Feldman clerked for Souter; perhaps he had something to do with the selection of Souter as this year’s speaker at the Harvard Graduation. Souter is fine, but hardly one at this point to see through a former clerk who is adept at the necessary arts. Possibly Faust et al. may give Feldman “credit” for “persuading” Souter to come, allowing Feldman to put another feather in his cap. Anything is possible. You have to stop these people when they're young.
You can believe a Muslim when he says he will kill you. Anything else is most likely a lie. The sooner Westerners understand that the better. I don't think the Israelis are swallowing this.
Three Gerges sentences from The Nation article that was the subject of the panel discussion:
"If the Western powers don't engage Hamas, they will never know if it can evolve into an open, tolerant and peaceful social movement. The jury is still out on whether the Islamist movement can make that painful and ideologically costly transition. But the claim that engaging Hamas legitimizes it does not carry much weight; the organization derives its legitimacy from the Palestinian people, a mandate resoundingly confirmed in the free and fair elections of 2006."
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
Hugh - I must make sure you know that I purposely used "that" instead of "who" in my sentence below (from my above comment):
"A Submitter to the Islamic Barbarians that HATE Jews."
Purposely! I saw what you said on another thread about propagandist Robert Gibbs and his solecism!
I sometimes feel that the followers of Islam are not worthy of being "who."
People - have you seen the movie "The Hurt Locker," a war movie which takes place in Iraq? Great news: *We're* the good guys! Rent it when you can. It's NOT PC.
Nakal: another to add to your list of those crossing over to the enemy: Roger Cohen, Columnist for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune and sometime Panelist. He was recently on one side of an Intelligence Squared debate on 10th Feb, titled "The US should step back from its special relationship with Israel". Cohen was on the "YES" side of this debate and his line was that US should stop aiding Israel so that Israel would be "weakened" so that it would then be forced to make the concessions that were "needed" to ensure that the West Bank could be given back and "peace" achieved. He also mentioned the line about undue Jewish influence on US government policy, for which he was upbraided by the former Israeli ambassador to the US.
I found Cohen's points distasteful.
It was also notable that in the version I saw of the debate (Bloomberg TV here in Hong Kong), there was not one mention of Hamas let alone its Charter and aim to annihilate Jews over the whole world. There was no discussion of how, in Cohen's view, this unilateral (for it would have to be unilateral) giving away of the west bank would ensure "peace"; only wishful thinking, or, to paraphrase one of the participants, Cohen seems to have only a wishbone not a backbone. That's putting the most charitable case for his view, of course.....
People like Cohen used to be known as "self-hating Jews". I'm not sure if that's "politically correct" anymore....
Al Taqiyya:
http://www.answering-islam.org/Index/T/taqiyya.html
Honestly, though I know that there are individual Palestians who want peace with Israel and are willing to allow two states to come into existence side-by-side, no one can take anything that comes from Ham-asses collective mouth seriousely.
Case in point, Hamass spokespeople recently stated that they were "sorry" about any israeli civilians their rockets might have murdered; then, two days or so later, the same spokesmen again stepped forward, only this time to say that they had been "misinterpreted."
It's indeed ironic that "hamas" in Hebrew means something like gratuitous violence/ oppression involving robbery, something like that that has no direct English translation. The word appears in the story of Noah in Genesis, where it says "Va timaleh ha-arets hamas"........."and the Earth was filled with corruption..." Yes. And isn't it ever.
Today I came across a hadith in the al Bukhari in which Muhammed ordered one of his followers to speak peacefully with a war captive and to mislead him with smooth speach. The Muslim captor, addressing his intended victim, spoke against Muhammed, then picked up a knife and slit the captives throat while his back was turned.
Yep. Gimme that good ol' al taqiyyah.
Have you been fighting the good fight so long that you have become weary? It DOES NOT MATTER. After a Friday visit to the mosque in the year 2060 their great grandchildren could change their minds. Al-Taqiyya gets my vote.
Nakal: another to add to your list of those crossing over to the enemy: Roger Cohen, Columnist for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune and sometime Panelist.
I could not agree more with your comments regarding Roger Cohen. If anything, you were too polite (for which I commend you though Cohen is not deserving of such civility).
Cohen, for me, epitomizes the acculturated British-Jewish
Left (or Commonwealth Jewish-Left as in Richard Goldstone
of the infamous Israel 'human rights' report) who all have
D. Phil. degrees in Oxon Sanctimony (Leftwing righteousness that can only be had at Oxford or Cambridge). Cohen is a twit extraordinaire, supremely arrogant, supremely unctious and in all matters international supremely wrong. Even the Guardian and BBC staff could not stand him so he was summarily exiled to NYC where he continued on bleating among the rarified community of Upper West Side Columbia
academics and Park Avenue status-conscious Leftists
(protesting against oppression in Ferragamos and Yves Saint Laurent couture).