NYT on Hamas 'Insults'
Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:17:26 pm PDT
Lots of readers emailed about this New York Times article by anti-Israel reporter Steven Erlanger, because the headline is so ludicrously understated: In Gaza, Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace.
Insults that complicate peace: suicide bombings, rocket attacks, random murder, genocidal intent, indoctrination of children into a death cult. Those kinds of insults do tend to complicate matters, don’t they?
But once you get past the headline, the article itself (although not devoid of the usual New York Times moral equivocating) does expose some of the barbarism of Hamas. You know, the kind of stuff we’ve been yelling about for seven years.
GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.
“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”
At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.
Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.
Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect [Hoot! – ed.] efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.
Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.
Intended to indoctrinate the young to its brand of radical Islam, which combines politics, social work and military resistance, including acts of terrorism, the programs of Al Aksa television and radio, including crucial Friday sermons, are an indication of how far from reconciliation Israelis and many Palestinians are.
Frank says:
