6-Dec-12: Turkish columnist asks: "Is Hamas real or a bad joke?" and offers a thoughtful answer

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and
Hamas' Gaza leader Ismail Haniyeh (Reuters)

Here, in full, is an op ed written by Burak Bekdil, and published yesterday on the Turkish news site Hurriyet Daily News. It's entitled "Is Hamas real or a bad joke?".

I am not sure if Hamas is unhappy or happy with Israel’s use of “disproportional force” each time the jihadists escalate indiscriminate rocket attacks against Jewish targets. I am not sure if we poor souls can ever understand the jihadists when they say “they love death more than we love life.” 

Hamas’ rhetoric stinks of death, nothing but death – indiscriminate death. Be it “our” death or “the enemy’s.” And it never metamorphoses into something more humane, something less nihilist. Most recently, in an interview with Today’s Zaman, Gaza’s Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, confidently spoke of “defending and liberating Jerusalem,” and “fighting the enemy forever.” 

According to Mr. Haniyeh, the nearly 200 dead Palestinians – including Palestinian children killed by errand Hamas rockets – proved Hamas’ “prowess.” He called the eight-day fighting a “victory.” 

In the same interview, the prime minister pledged to prepare “bodies and army” for the next attack on Israel and to keep their strategy “always based on armed struggle.” Mr. Haniyeh defines the Palestinian borders as “from Palestine as we know it [Gaza, West bank and Jerusalem] to Rafah and from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.” 

Mr. Haniyeh claims that “with every [Israeli] attack we grow stronger.” Since “Muslims don’t cheat or lie,” one cannot help but wonder if the Israeli Defense Forces are secretly conspiring for Hamas’ jihad. If what Mr. Haniyeh says is true, why do the willing subscribers of the Palestinian cause across the world, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, complain of Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Hamas targets? They should instead welcome every attack, thinking every attack will strengthen Hamas. Is that too cruel to say? Ask Mr. Haniyeh. 

But Hamas can be amusing too. Its charter is must-read fun. My favorite section is the one which states: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” 

Other pearls of humanity include holding Jews responsible for a wide range of events and disasters going as far back in history as the French Revolution. The Hamas covenant also provides justification for fighting and killing Jews, without distinction of “whether they are in Israel or elsewhere.” 

Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s section on Hamas contains these headings, among others: Military wing, Islamization efforts, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, statements on the Holocaust (another fun read), children as human shields, children as combatants, human rights abuses, rocket attacks on Israel, attempts to derail 2010 peace talks, themes of martyrdom, guerilla warfare and other targets. Another heading reads: Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey as a role model. We are honored! 

And the U.N.-sponsored probe into the previous war, the Goldstone Report, accused Israel of war crimes and other offenses, but it also found that:

• They (Hamas’s activities) constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population. These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity... The rocket and mortar attacks launched by armed Palestinian groups have caused terror. 

• Hamas continues to view all armed activity directed against Israel as … a legitimate right of the Palestinian people.

• The security services under the control of the Gaza authorities carried out extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, detentions and ill treatment of people.

The latest war is over. Hamas is happy because the war gave Hamas what it says it loves more than we love life. And I tend to blame the whole bloodshed on stupid trees and rocks in the holy lands. They still refuse to call out to Muslims or Abdullah and betray the last Jew hiding behind them – the last Jew to be killed.

He's also the author of "Sorry to remind you (but Golda Meir was right!)".

2-Apr-11: Quotes of the week: Judge Goldstone - too little and much too late

On Friday, Judge Richard Goldstone, principal author of a UN report bearing his name, published an extraordinary confessional in the pages of the Washington Post. It starts with these words:

"We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council..."

The editor of the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz, writing with his customary eloquence, pays close attention to Goldstone's words and places them into a thoroughly deserved moral context:

"Yom Kippur has evidently come early this year for Richard Goldstone.
He couldn’t quite bring himself, in his Friday article “Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and War Crimes,” to write, “I have sinned, forgive me.”  But the astounding piece in the Washington Post by the Jewish justice, who presided over the Goldstone Report that accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, represents nothing less than an apology to Israel.
“If I had known then what I know now,” he writes in the first extraordinary paragraph of his mea culpa, “the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”
How dramatic the about-face.
And how terrible that it was necessitated.  How tragic, that is, that Goldstone so misplaced his moral compass in the first place as to have produced a report that has caused such irreversible damage to Israel’s good name. Tragic least of all for the utterly discredited Goldstone himself, and most of all for our unfairly besmirched armed forces and the country they were putting their lives on the line to honorably defend against a ruthless, murderous, terrorist government in Gaza...
An apology just isn’t good enough. The very least he owes Israel is to work unstintingly from now on to try to undo the damage he has caused.
Yom Kipper came early this year for Richard Goldstone.
His show of penitence has come far too late."

We believe Goldstone's report did more harm to the global struggle against terrorism than any other single action anywhere and any time. We hope the Horovitz article gets read in full and distributed as widely as possible.

UPDATE Sunday morning: The acerbic British columnist Melanie Phillips has weighed in with a plain-speaking, no-holds-barred dissection of Goldstone's mea culpa:

What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire. There was ample evidence that Hamas was deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way. There was ample evidence that Hamas does not operate under the rule of law or uphold human rights. There was ample evidence that Israeli rules of engagement required the IDF to avoid hitting civilians wherever possible. There was ample evidence that Israel always investigates allegations of misconduct made against its soldiers and holds them to acount under the rule of law. Yet Goldstone, having accepted the poisoned chalice from the UN Human Rights Council to subject Israel to a show trial whose verdict preceded the evidence (despite his protestations that he modified this odious remit), chose to believe the propaganda put out by Hamas... Like all previous blood libels against the Jews, the poison this one has injected into the global bloodstream has no antidote. The damage is done – and no amount of self-serving recantations by Richard Goldstone will undo the terrible harm he has done.

Her article is here.

30-May-10: A window into the real Gaza

As the "humanitarians" of the Free Gaza flotilla get ready to make their grand gesture, time for another gentle reminder of the double-talk, the hypocrisy and the outright lies that characterize the attacks on Israel (and this certainly includes the disgraceful Goldstone Report) for defending itself, its people and its society from the jihadist onslaught led by the Gazan Hamas regime.