“Our people achieved victory by Jihad” and other top hits. It’s sing along with Hamas in Gaza. From AFP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip: They may be Islamic radicals but even Hamas values a catchy pop tune, cranking out 10 new victory songs about Israel’s historic pullout from the Gaza Strip.
Notorious for its use of suicide bombers in Israel, the extremist faction has now released “Gaza Victory News,” its latest weapon in its propaganda war with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party.
Seeking credit for the end of Israel’s 38-year occupation, the album, with a sinister masked man and an Israeli soldier’s boot in flames on the cover, boasts songs by the Yassin Band, named after the late Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin.
The songs are generally drum machine and violin-filled. Thunderous baritone choirs and a male tenor or child’s soprano weave in and out on tracks called “Gaza, it has come,” “We liberated Gaza” and “It is returned with blood.”
The message is clear: that Hamas’s military wing forced Israel out of Gaza.
The music has scored with Gaza’s youth, weaned on a culture of guns and “martyrdom.”
“These songs encourage us to fight the settlers in the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Jerusalem, everywhere,” says falafel seller Ziad Abu Taha, 26….
“Hamas is the strongest party, so it makes the best music,” opines 20-year-old Mahmoud.
In an impromptu survey, kids, who have heard the song on the tape or Hamas’s Aqsa radio station, raved about “Gaza, it has come.”
“The victory flags fly and the wounds are on it, but the brutal army withdrew and the independence fighter cries: “Our people achieved victory by Jihad,” go the lyrics.