Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Palestinians Admit Using Human Shields

http://peacewithrealism.org/headline/admit.htm
March 15, 2008 -  To enlighten those who may have harbored any doubts,
Fathi Ahmad Hammad, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council,
said it loud and said it proud: Palestinians deliberately use women
and children as human shields.
This is the transcript of his remarks (but it is worth watching the
clip just to hear the hatred in his voice):
[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has
developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the
Palestinian people, 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
have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and
the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It
is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: "We desire death like
you desire life."
Hammad is a leader of the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades, the military
wing of Hamas, and in 2006 was elected to the Palestinian Parliament
as a Hamas representative. He is also director of Al-Aqsa TV, which
aired his comments on February 29.
You may remember Al-Aqsa TV. This is the TV station that fills dear
little ears with hate, that brought Palestinian children Farfur Mouse
and Nahoul Bee. Among its many poisonous features are music videos,
such as one showing a four-year-old girl singing a song to her mom,
who blows herself up and kills four Israeli soldiers. Afterwards the
girl holds a bomb and sings: "I am following Mommy in her steps."
Other videos feature children in military uniforms and holding guns.
Now Hammad discloses the Hamas strategy, which some have suspected but
few have actually believed: use people, especially women and children,
as human shields. If you won't believe me, will you believe a member
of Hamas?
This strategy has been immensely successful. Fire at Israeli cities
from schoolyards, and make Israel choose between allowing its own
children to be targets or risking harm to others. Now we know beyond a
doubt that Hamas knows what it is doing, and is doing it
intentionally.
ut people still will not believe. The prevailing attitude is typified
in the words of Javier Solana, head of foreign policy for the European
Union:
"I cannot imagine that the religious imperative, the real religious
imperative, can make anybody destroy another country.... Therefore
that is an abuse of religion.... I don't think the essence of Hamas is
the destruction of Israel. The essence of Hamas is the liberation of
the Palestinians, the liberation of their people, not the destruction
of Israel."
This is the mistake Westerners, profoundly ignorant of history, make
over and over again: to assume that all cultures everywhere hold the
same values they do. This is a dangerous form of ethnocentrism.
Perhaps if Solana had been listening, he would have heard how Hamas
repeatedly proclaims its intention to destroy Israel.
He might have read the following from the Hamas Charter:
Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it.
Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave.
The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill
them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O
Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!
Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish
population, defies Islam and the Muslims.
Solana's dangerous naïveté is a luxury the world cannot afford.
So what does all of this add up to?
The Palestinians have successfully sold the idea that they are
resisting an occupation. Israel is the occupier, the Palestinians are
resisting, so the problem can be solved by pressuring Israel
politically, economically, and militarily. This is the big lie of the
Israel/Palestine conflict.
For when we examine both Palestinian words and actions, we see that
this is really something much different from what it seems. The
rhetoric of hatred, the indoctrination of children, the Palestinians'
willingness to use their own people as martyrs for the sake of
blackening Israel's image, the constant threats to destroy Israel and
to liberate "all" of Palestine, are all signs that this is no
revolutionary movement in the Western mold. This is a jihad in the
most traditional and most extreme sense of the word. This is a war for
Israel's extermination.
The Palestinians say they want Israel to withdraw, but they punish
Israel when it does. The most extreme factions have taken over Gaza
and are threatening the same in the West Bank. And the influence of
outside parties, particularly Iran, is growing.
The most disruptive force in this conflict is Iran, yet international
attention is focused on Israel. The pressure on Iran to contain its
nuclear program is totally ineffectual, but it is at least visible.
There is no international pressure at all on Iran to withdraw its
tentacles from the Palestinian territories, and to stop using Hamas
and Hezbollah to torpedo any movement towards peace barely as soon as
it begins. Meanwhile all the pressure in the world on Israel is not
going to halt the forces trying to destroy it and push the world
towards a global catastrophe whose reach will far exceed the Middle
East.
When Fathi Hammad ran for the Palestinian Parliament in 2006, his
campaign promise was that Hamas "will continue to develop its armed
wings by recruiting more members and making more rockets and bombs."
And the people voted for him and elected him. His TV station is now
helping to prepare the next generation of holy warriors. Samir Abu
Mohsen, who directs one of the station's hate shows for kids, says
that the character Nahoul Bee exists to remind Palestinian children
that they are in exile and must commit themselves to getting back
their land. What land? These children live in Gaza, and Israelis are
gone from there. The land these children are being trained to reclaim
by force is clearly Israel.
Note also how much of the imagery and rhetoric is not just anti-Israel
but anti-Jewish: the poster of the Hasidic Jew, "our struggle against
the Jews" from the Hamas Charter, "O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding
behind me, come on and kill him!" What's the meaning of all this?
Instead of yet another barrage of complaints about the irrelevance of
"anti-Semitism," what we really need is to understand these
expressions of hate in their historical context. They are nothing new.
The pronouncement to kill the Jew hiding behind the tree comes from
the Hadith, the teachings of Muhammad himself (Sahih Muslim, 41:6985).
In one children's television episode, Nahoul Bee says "we will go as
Islamic fighters" to fight "the enemies of Allah, the killers of
prophets." The charge that the Jews killed their prophets is way older
than the State of Israel and has been a mainstay of both Christian and
Muslim anti-Semitism. It is indeed found in the Qur'an (2:61, 2:87,
5:70-71).
Anti-Jewish sentiment is deeply ingrained in Muslim tradition, and it
comes from projecting forward through history Muhammad's conflicts
with the Jews of his own time. Muhammad did speak in generalities
about "Jews," and since his words are considered timeless, many
Muslims apply them to the Jews of today. One can still hear Muhammad's
words applied this way in countless Friday sermons from mosques around
the world.
It is important to recognize this in order to understand why a Jewish
state of all things is anathema to so many Muslims. The Jews were the
tribes that Muhammad defeated and expelled when he unified Arabia
under Islam. Jews are supposed to recognize the authority and
dominance of Islam. They are not supposed to rule anything, especially
not right in the middle of the Muslim world. A Jewish state in the
heart of the Muslim world is a desecration of Muslim history. This
feeling runs very deep. It is not me crying anti-Semitism like the boy
cried "Wolf." It is history.
Therefore a historical consciousness is necessary in order to fathom
what Hamas is doing. The symbols that Hamas uses, from the Qur'an,
from the Hadith, and from later Christian anti-Jewish literature, all
point towards a continuation of the original jihad. This is hard for
Westerners to understand, but this is what the fight means to Hamas.
They are completing the work that Muhammad started. It is not
something about which they can compromise. And international
condemnation of Israel only gives it more power.
For this cause Hamas is willing to sacrifice its own children as
martyrs. And if Israel gets the blame for it, so much the better. If
we do not understand the present Palestinian violence for what it is -
not an effort to end an occupation of some territories but a
continuation of the real, original jihad and a fight to the death -
then attempts to force an end to the conflict will only help make
inevitable the catastrophic conclusion that all but the religious
fanatics are dreading.
We must at least respect the religious mind of Hamas enough to
understand it on its own terms. It may seem too strange to us to
believe, so like Solana we impose our own reality on it. That is
foolish and perilous. We must not ever forget that in the Middle East
the word "occupation" has a double meaning. To the West, it means
Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza. That is not what it means
to Hamas. To Hamas, "occupation" means the existence of an entity that
defies Islam. And when Hamas fights to end the "occupation,"
obliterating that entity is precisely what it aims to achieve.

Fuoreggia su Internet l'affermazione che hamas utilizza civili come
scudi umani, nulla di nuovo sotto il sole : affermazioni già sentite
in tutti questi anni e in Libano
1 evidentemente ai civili sta bene,essere utilizzati come "scudi
umani" visto che  non sono  mai emerse  denunce  da parte libanese o
palestinese  su tale problematica.  Interviste e foto  che sarebbe
pagata a peso d'oro
2 Non risultano foto di donne, anziani, bambini legati da Hamas  sui
tetti ecc,
3 Ricordo bene, le testimonianze  di anziani che ,insieme agli
abitanti delproprio  villaggio avevano scelto di diventare  scudi
umani per evitare la distruzione della propria casa
4 Nè mi risulta che Abu Mazen, sempre pronto ad accusare a torto o  a
ragione  hamas di ogni malafatta , abbia mai denunciato episodi del
genere e, sicuramente, se avesse avuto prove lo avrebbe fatto
5  dai blog, dalle interviste di haaretz si evidenzia che i residenti
di gaza cercano di allontanare i lanciatori di razzi dalle loro
abitazioni, ma  ritengono più "nemici" i raid israeliani
6 Cartina di tornasole: l'0biettivo di Israele era di rendere
"difficili"le condizioni di vita dei civili per spingerli a ribellarsi
ad hamas : questo non è avvenuto. Forse sarebbe il caso di cominciare
a pensare che  ,indipendentemente dal nostro giudizio, i palestinesi
stanno attuando una forma di lotta popolare  che coinvolge
consapevolmente  tutta la popolazione. Prendere atto di questo  non
sarebbe male
7 Quelli che amano far circolare  queste informazioni, mossi solo da
finalità propagandistiche,  farebbero   bene, a chiedersi come mai
Sderot non è stata mai protetta, in 7 anni, da un'adeguato sistema
difensivo  e permettessero ad  hamas e ad  Abu Mazen  di definire   i
propri  rapporti senza "interessate" interferenze "umanitarie"
8 fa sempre piacere scoprire una tale pressante preoccupazione   da
parte di chi difende un assedio perverso: solo confini sicuri potranno
trasformare in sangue e carne lo slogan tanto caro alla destra :
Israele  ama la vita
http://frammentivocalimo.blogspot.com/2008/03/che-noia-il-solito-discorso-su-hamas-e.html

 propri  rapporti senza "interessate" interferenze "umanitarie"
???????
-Stefano