Common Folk Using Common Sense

Trackbacked at Austin Bay, Captain’s Quarters, The Jawa Report:

Hamas‘ apparent victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections has dramatically shaken up the political landscape of the Middle East, elevating Islamic militants who call for Israel’s destruction.

Hamas, acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah (literally “Islamic Resistance Movement”), is a Palestinian Islamist movement and political party closely related to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its stated goal is to to “remove Israel from the map”, and to establish an Islamic theocracy in the area that is currently Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Hamas is listed as a terrorist group by the European Union, Canada, the United States, and Israel, and its attacks targeting Israeli civilians and other human rights abuses have been condemned by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Israeli officials refused to comment Thursday on the Palestinian elections but there was a general feeling in Israel that peace prospects had suffered a significant blow.

“Israel can’t accept a situation in which Hamas, in its present form as a terror group calling for the destruction of Israel, will be part of the Palestinian Authority without disarming,” acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement issued by his office.

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, according to news reports, called it a “very, very, very bad result.”

By law Mahmoud Abbas, in his role as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, must ask the largest party in the new parliament - presumably Hamas - to form the new government. Abbas was elected separately a year ago and remains president, and would still remain in charge of negotiations with Israel.

Whether peacemaking with Israel can go forward will now largely depend on whether Hamas joins Fatah in the government, and whether it will abandon the violent ideology that underpinned the wave of suicide bombings it carried out against Israel. Israel has repeatedly asked Abbas to force Hamas and other militant groups to disarm but Abbas has refused, warning such an act could cause civil war.

Israeli officials convened emergency meetings on Thursday to decide how to respond to the militant Hamas group’s upset victory in Palestinian elections, maintaining an outward silence while privately blaming each other for the upheaval.

Both Israel and the United States have declared Hamas a terrorist group and refuse to deal with it. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the U.S. position on Hamas as a terrorist organization has not changed with the group’s stunning victory in Palestinian elections, and Palestinian leaders must renounce violence and terror if they want world support. “You cannot have one foot in politics and another in terror,” Rice told the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland via a telephone hookup to the State Department. “Our position on Hamas has therefore not changed.”

President Bush reiterated Washington’s view that Hamas cannot be a partner in the Middle East peace process. “I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform.” He also said, “I have made it very clear however that a political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of a platform is a party with which we will not deal.”

“Hamas is a terrorist organization, which means they believe it is their right to murder women, children and innocent civilians to achieve their goals,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “It is unrealistic, unwise and even immoral to ask Israel to sit down with a government that contains people who have such beliefs. No other country would, why should Israel?”

Quotes from Hamas Charter:

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

Suicide attacks are an element of what the group sees as its asymmetric warfare against Israel. Because the group considers all Israel to be a “militarized society”, and it believes Israelis to be participants in an illegal occupation of Palestinian land, Hamas does not distinguish between Israeli civilian and military targets. This failure to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, and the group’s willingness to select civilian targets at random, has helped to earn it the label of terrorist organization.

Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi a former Hamas leader reiterated beliefs of Holocaust denial, contending that the Holocaust did not occur in the manner described by Western historians and that Zionists at one time supported and funded Nazi activities.

Hamas asserts that struggle (jihad) to wrest control of the land from Israel is a religious duty incumbent on every Muslim individually. The Hamas Covenant, written in 1988, states that the organization’s goal is to “raise the banner of God over every inch of Palestine,” i.e. to eliminate the State of Israel (and any secular Palestinian state which may be established), and to replace it with an Islamic Republic.

Hamas has an unknown number of hard-line members and tens of thousands of supporters and sympathizers. It receives funding from Palestinian expatriates, from the Islamist regime in Iran, and from private benefactors in Saudi Arabia and in other Arab states. Some fundraising and propaganda activity take place in Western Europe, North America and South America. Hamas has been known to use illicit drug sales to raise funds for its operations.

Hamas militants, especially those in the Ezzedeen-al-qassam Brigades, have conducted many attacks, including large-scale suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets. These include:

• the Passover massacre in March 2002, in which 30 people were killed in a terrorist attack while celebrating the Jewish festival of Passover
• the Patt junction massacre (19 dead)
• the Jerusalem bus 20 massacre in November 2002 (11 dead)
• the Jerusalem bus 2 massacre in August 2003 (23 dead)

Hundreds of Israeli civilians have been killed in Hamas suicide attacks. Hamas has used female suicide bombers, including a mother of six and a mother of two children under the age of 10.

And these are the people that have been voted into office. Utterly amazing. The inmates are running the asylum.

Hamas, Palestinian, Middle East, Islam, Israel

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