Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is lobbying the EU to take Hamas off the terrorist list despite the fact that the group’s ranks are filled with suicide bombers and thugs who launch rockets into civilian neighborhoods while hiding behind civilians and children themselves. Haniyeh is also claiming that Hamas has no problem with the Jews despite the fact that the charter of the group he leads actually calls for the extermination of Israel.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Via Times of Israel (h/t GMBDR):
The Hamas prime minister in the Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniyeh, on Sunday called on European governments to remove Hamas and other Palestinian groups from their list of terrorist organizations.
The time has come for European states to lift Hamas’s classification as a terrorist group, Haniyeh told a European delegation to Gaza, days after Hamas and other terror groups fired 1,500 rockets into Israel in the course of an eight-day conflict with Israel. He said that his organization, and the other Palestinian groups operating in the Gaza Strip, are “national liberation movements engaged in self-defense in the face of Israel’s continued aggression against our people.”
According to Haniyeh, Israel is the world’s largest terrorist state. “The time has come to prosecute the leaders of the occupation for their continued crimes against our people, the latest being the Eight Days’ Aggression,” he said, referring to last month’s Operation Pillar of Defense.
Hamas’ 1988 charter calls for the eradication of Israel.
Yet, we’re to believe Haniyeh when he says he has no problem with the Jews while trying to get taken off a terrorist list?
More from the Times of Israel:
Though Haniyeh thanked the delegates — among them 54 parliamentarians and political officials, according to Bethlehem-based Ma’an News — for “the effort that has been devoted to lifting the siege of the Gaza Strip and to mount an international legal campaign to prosecute the occupation’s leaders as war criminals,” he said that the root of the problem is the occupation of Palestinian land.
“We have no problem with Jews worldwide, and we don’t oppose Jews because of their Jewish identity,” Channel 10 quoted him saying. “We have a problem with the occupation that controls our land.”
Really? It is indeed interesting to note that conceding ground with one’s mouth in Islam is done without altering what’s in the heart is not unprecedented. Consider what Hamas did in 2006 in the run-up to elections in Gaza.
Via UK Guardian:
Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto for the Palestinian parliamentary election in a fortnight, a move that brings the group closer to the mainstream Palestinian position of building a state within the boundaries of the occupied territories.
The Islamist faction, responsible for a long campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis, still calls for the maintenance of the armed struggle against occupation. But it steps back from Hamas’s 1988 charter demanding Israel’s eradication and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place.
The manifesto makes no mention of the destruction of the Jewish state and instead takes a more ambiguous position by saying that Hamas had decided to compete in the elections because it would contribute to “the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem”.
Less than one year ago, Haniyeh called for the extermination of the Jews.
In this metaphor, the West is represented by Charlie Brown and Haniyeh is represented by Lucy.