18-Mar-13: Both Hamas and Fatah ask that we pay close attention to the great similarities between them

Fatah's Abbas and Hamas' Haniyeh: In the fog of the war against the terrorists,
it can be hard to tell them apart, and they agree [Image Source]

Khaled Abu Toameh, writing on the Gatestone Institute website ["Hamas: We are Not Terrorists; We Just Want to Destroy Israel"] today, says there's a Hamas campaign underway right now to have the U.S. State Department remove Hamas from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He points out that this not because of any change in how Hamas operates.

Hamas wants to be removed from the list without changing its strategy or charter, which call for jihad [holy war] and which do not recognize Israel's right to exist. Hamas is also not prepared to dismantle its armed group, Izaddin al-Kassam, as part of its effort to persuade the US and EU to drop it from the list of terrorist groups. Nor is Hamas prepared to stop smuggling weapons or give up thousands of rockets and mortars that it possesses in various parts of the Gaza Strip. And of course Hamas is not prepared to renounce violence in the context of its effort to seek legitimacy in the international community.

So for all the above compelling reasons (!), we can understand why Hamas is focusing its efforts on getting a number of European Union countries to give it their support. (Obviously!)

Hamas claims that it has won the secret backing of a number of EU governments - a claim denied by the EU... The Hamas demand was first raised by the movement's prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, during a meeting with European supporters in the Gaza Strip last month.
Ghazi Hamad a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, says that his movement is putting pressure on several countries to change their position toward his movement. He believes that there has already been a "positive change" in the minds of Western and Arab societies toward Hamas.

Abu Toameh points out that this is happening just as Hamas' relations with the Moslem Brotherhood regime in Egypt have turned seriously sour, and (on the other hand) it 

coincides with growing cooperation between the movement and other radical groups in the Gaza Strip, primarily Islamic Jihad. During the last war in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and Islamic Jihad militiamen formed a joint command to coordinate rocket attacks against Israel. More recently, it was revealed that Fatah's armed wing, Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, also helped Hamas fire rockets at Israel in recent years.

This spirit of co-operation between terrorist organizations appears to have affected Fatah too. In the past 24 hours we have seen reports in which the case for Hamas was being promoted by none other than Mahmoud Abbas himself. It's on show in a syndicated UPI report entitled "Abbas says Hamas is not terrorist group", based on an interview the Arab politician gave to Russia's RT network:

Hamas is committed to peaceful resistance and there is no need to label it a terrorist organization, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said. In an exclusive weekend interview with Russia Today, the Palestinian president responded to reports that the European Union is considering taking Hamas off the list of terrorist organizations. "Chances are quite high that the Hamas government may be recognized as legitimate. If Hamas is committed to the cease-fire and if it openly pledges to stick to the peaceful popular resistance, I don't see much difference between their policy and ours. In this case, there is no need to label them as a terrorist organization," Abbas said... "All Arabs and Muslims are ready to have peace with Israel. Arabs are not going to attack Israel after it withdraws from the occupied territories," he said. [UPI]

We see two consequences to these new reports:

1. Abbas should certainly be believed when he admits he does not see much difference between Hamas' policy and his own. He is uniquely well placed to know, and should be arrested and charged with terrorist offences forthwith. It's long past time that this duplicitous public figure be held to account for the lethal words and deeds that have characterized his role in public life going back decades. He provided the funding (see his Wikipedia entry) for the 1972 massacre of Israelis at the Munich Olympics. He has been an active proponent of Holocaust-denial since at least the time he completed his Holocaust-denying academic thesis at Peoples' Friendship University of Russia. He has maintained his attachment to Holocaust denial right up to the present, as reported in the past few weeks. And over and again he has publicly honored self-confessed terrorists, including the murderers of children, without ever paying any evident price.
2. As Abu Toameh writes: "Anyone who supports Hamas's bid should also vote in favor of removing Al-Qaeda from the same list".

The good people at Palestinian Media Watch already noted this a while back. See their report: "Internal Palestinian issues | Fatah-Hamas relations".