For instance, their 25th anniversary parade would have been a GOOD chance to take out many Hamas terrorists.
Posted on 10/14/2023 5:57:21 AM PDT by FarCenter
For the past 20 years, the best minds in Washington and Jerusalem treated Hamas as a pragmatic political operator whose leaders were satisfied living in the same world as the rest of us. Their charter, first adopted in 1988, endorsed a set of bloodcurdling millenarian goals. But despite the open madness and world-making ambitions of their public pronouncements, Hamas remained a semi-legitimate player, treated as just one unremarkable thread in the Middle East’s rich tapestry of mildly threatening, gun-toting political dreamers. Even to the most hardened Israeli security officials they were a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot whose extreme rhetoric and regrettably unshakable habit of murdering Jewish civilians could be understood within the normative politics of “resistance movements.” Their behavior could therefore be modulated and controlled through a proper combination of sticks and carrots.
This view is untenable after this weekend, but I understand why it existed for so long. I once held versions of it myself. I visited the Gaza Strip on a two-day reporting trip in the winter of 2014, a couple of months after what was naively thought of as a major round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. I joined the ranks of journalists stupid enough to believe what we thought we’d seen there.
The Hamas statelet, though no poorer than places I’d been in Egypt and Jordan, and materially better off than Somalia or South Sudan, possessed its own special feeling of isolation that had the weight of an ambient despair. It was unnerving to turn on the radio and hear martial chanting about avenging Al-Aqsa, or to constantly look at billboards of Knesset member Yehuda Glick in a sniper crosshair. Members of the Strip’s Hamas-controlled police force used the empty lot down the street from my hotel on the Gaza City waterfront as a drilling ground.
But that was hardly the whole story, I thought. After all, my hotel offered a comfortable room with stunning views of the Mediterranean. Hamas was eerily invisible in the Strip once you were past their checkpoint on the Gaza side of the Erez border crossing, whose Israeli half is an absurdist labyrinth of concrete corridors, sinister loudspeakers, and remote-operated doors. Most Gazans I met had no particular love for the group and just wanted to be left alone. Gaza was hard to beat for sheer surrealism, what with the war damage and the excellent fish restaurants. I experienced the Hamas-era Strip as a weird and tragic expression of a bleak roster of immovable realities.
I now know I suffered from a failure of imagination, both moral and practical. Under Hamas, Gaza wasn’t a place where extremists had resigned themselves to their own strange version of normality. Rather, it was an active launching pad for an insane utopia, for the vision of a purified world the group’s fighters carried out during their atrocious rampage this past weekend.
The expert class labored under similar delusions. “It wasn’t so much a misreading of what was in [Hamas’] hearts as it was the sense that they had accommodated to reality,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and deputy national security adviser under George W. Bush, including the period when Hamas won the only Palestinian parliamentary elections in history and took over the Gaza Strip.
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No matter what brand Muslim you are talking about.
You can not trust them.
They are taught that anybody that is not their brand of Muslin is inferior and can be dealt with any way you like.
“... pragmatic political operator...” COEXIST!!
The lack of awareness kills.
It is a clearer, more obvious version of what is happening in the United States with an open Southern border.
“... the best minds in Washington...”
A five word oxymoron if there such a thing.
The author sounds naive and arrogant.
He relies on “experts” who are no smarter than himself, who look at Islam through a Western lens and can’t understand why Muslims act the way they do.
As Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said, “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”
Believe them when they say they want to kill you.
The so called experts are fools, so how hard was it to fool them?
Comments BUMP
“Experts”
Bahahahahahahaj
They must have had their heads up their butts
“The so called experts are fools, so how hard was it to fool them?”
They aren’t fools. They know exactly what they’re doing.
Experts = Libtards know it all’s with an agenda
——who are no smarter than himself——
That is a very prescient thought
Hamas is intellectually deficient. Hamas can’t understand that it is a bogus organization developed by Iran for the specific purpose of creating turmoil in Israel.
Similarly in America we have Black Lives Matter
If you want to "Fool" somebody, just find a bunch of fools and have at it.... :(
“we remind you of your Prophet’s directives: set forth and fight for the sake of Allah against the infidels who [renounce] Allah, [but] do not commit treachery or excess, mutilate bodies or kill children or monks... [the text is taken from a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad].”
“In footage aired April 27 on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV....regained by force alone.”
Look at the maps and the picture of the young men cutting barbed wire and the V-for-victory hand signs:
All these “experts” are just whores. They’ll say anything for the right price. If you speak the truth they cancel you. Eventually the truth will out. Unfortunately after these pigs are rich and thousands are dead.
That is precisely what most people (including world leaders) don’t know or don’t understand.
The Islamic religion believes that anyone who is not a believer is to be converted or be killed. This is an irrevocable dogma of their faith.
It can be waived for Christians and Jews if they pay a debilitating tax which is intended to encourage conversion.
Islam is a blood thirsty cult with a desire for the believer’s own bloody death. Death in Jehad is the only sure way to Paradise for the Muslim.
Armenia is only one of the more recent genocides in Islam’s history. The history of Islam is a trail of War, famine, slavery and atrocities.
Only acts of God brought about by supreme acts of prayer and piety of the Christian faithful have stopped their expansion in the past.
Unfortunately their is a profound dearth of faithful Christians in the world today.
For instance, their 25th anniversary parade would have been a GOOD chance to take out many Hamas terrorists.
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