24-Nov-14: What it takes to be a real man in a society of sociopaths

Courtesy IDF Blog [here]

Fathi Hamad, once the Hamas minister of the interior and a man who has a way with words - ugly words, conveying violent hatred, often directed at putting the lives of children at risk - got a mention in a post we published here earlier today, and not for the first time: click here for other Hamad appearances in our blog.

Just this afternoon, by coincidence, someone over at the IDF Spokesperson's Office gave Hamad the ultimate accolade: a poster of his own, and a quote that reminds people of what a man's man this man is. 

Ah, but this Hamad is so much more than just a pretty face. 

Six years ago, Frimet Roth quoted him in a post ["27-Mar-08: Palestinian infanticide"] on our blog that got a fair amount of attention because of the way Hamad's rant completely upended some outrageously dishonest statements famously made some years earlier by Hanan Ashrawi, the long-time apologist for the now-deceased, corrupt despot, Yasser Arafat. 

Frimet quoted a Hamad speech delivered on February 29, 2008 that had been broadcast on the Hamas Al Aqsa television channel, reaching an exclusively Arabic-speaking audience, unfortunately. MEMRI fixed that; they translated it to English, under the title "We Used Women and Children as Human Shields" and put it where the world could see and pay attention:

"For the Palestinian people", Hamad boasts in Arabic, "death has become an industry at which women excel and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this and so do the mujahideen and the children... This is why they [the Palestinian people] have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine."

Frimet recalled how Ashrawi had appeared on the CBS "Sixty Minutes" program back in October 2000 [transcript here], injecting heat but not so much light into an interview with the show's Bob Simon:

"To me this is the essence, the epitome, of racism... They're telling us we are – we have no feelings for our children? We're not parents? We're not mothers or fathers? This is just incredible." 

As Frimet wrote in that 2008 post: Indeed it is. But we in the Middle East learned long ago that reality can be incredible.