Unmasking The Hamas Code Of Honor

'Judith with the Head of Holofernes' by Cristofano Allori 1613, Royal Collection, Windsor

 

Hamas' scramble to issue a deadline is yet another leaf out of the horrendously effective PR campaign Palestinian Terrorists have been waging in the West for decades.

News channels are toppling over to report the 'Breaking News' of the Hamas deadline, and Israel's response, ignoring the pathetic ploy repeated for the umpteenth time: Diverting the focus away from Palestinian terror to so called Israeli aggression, in the ever persistent push to legitimize genocidal Jihad as a supposedly just response to Israeli territorial occupation beyond the 1948 UN partition plan.

Palestinians have learned long ago how to harness anti-Zionist sentiment in the West, ever present and sadly widespread among political and media elites and influencers, both Gentiles and Jews, to spin their unequivocal call for Israel's destruction in its entirety as a resistant movement with reasonable and limited territorial demands.

When did a MSM report last call attention to the fact that the emblems of all major Palestinian organizations include a map of present-day Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and that every one of these organizations, PLO, Fatha, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad pursue the reversal of Israel's creation. Just as none of the Arab states embrace Israel as a permanent member of their Middle Eastern league of nations, not one Palestinian organization includes the state of Israel as a permanent fixture in their long-term plans for the region. All that differs are the means to achieve the elimination of Israel; some prefer the demographic destruction of Israel, others, like Hamas and Thug-In-Chief Ahmadinejad, favor a more expedient genocidal solution.

It really doesn't matter, as long as we understand that even the most 'moderate' strategies merely divide the same end-goal into a two-step approach: First, establish a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries and then, as a second step, "use that state to liberate the rest of the Palestinian lands".

When has the MSM last explained the 'peaceful' strategy to destruct Israel demographically; the demand that the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war must be entitled to an unconditional 'right of return' to Israel for all eternity? The intention is so blatant that failing to report it without ambiguity is either incompetence or deliberate bias.

What is this deadline really about? I say primarily to steal the show in view of an increasingly agitated and impatient Olmert. Israel will soon act to locate and hopefully free an alive Cpl.Gilad Shalit and most certainly not even consider any exchanges or deals. But what if Shalit is dead? What if he gets killed in the process? Watch how in the coming days Hamas will do and say everything in the desperate attempt to gloss over what is rapidly deteriorating into a massively costly blunder for the murdering thugs, continuing the war without end.

Khaled Abu Toameh believes its just another episode of an internal power struggle within Hamas. He wrote on June 28 in the Jerusalem Post that the kidnapping "revealed the nature of a secret power struggle that has been raging among the top brass of Hamas political leadership ever since the Islamic movement won the parliamentary election last January."

Today it is evident that there are two major forces in Hamas - one headed by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the second by Damascus-based Khaled Mashaal. Haniyeh represents the relatively moderate and pragmatic camp in Hamas, whereas Mashaal is viewed as a hardliner who is taking Hamas toward further extremism.

In many ways, the dispute within Hamas resembles the historic conflict between the 'old guard' and the 'young guard' in the rival Fatah party. But while the power struggle in Fatah has been over money and power, the feud in Hamas is over the movement's future political and military strategy.

There it is again, it's all the same in the end. But unless we keep reminding ourselves that these are just differing approaches to achieve the destruction of Israel, we will easily get sucked into the overall media and PR spin of the century.

Well, not if my friend Ed Morrissey keeps the record straight, and my good friend Micheal van der Galien keeps delivering the punches. My friends keep vital perspective....and the inimitable Joe Katzman, Omri Ceren, and the boys @ Winds of Change watch out for the traps. Ted Belman @ Israpundit is his usual prudent self watching our back, concerned that Israel is not ready for war with "Hamas set[ting] the pace by proving faster on the draw than Israel in filling the vacuum left by the failed Egyptian mediation."

Olmert does not however seem to be confused about the way forward

"Yesterday I ordered army commanders to prepare our forces for a long and ongoing military operation in order to strike terror and its commanders. We will get to everyone wherever they are. There will be no immunity for anyone."

How can there ever be hope, when this is the poison captured on video, being fed to their children (h/t Allah @ Hot Air, a good place to check for his latest updates on Cpl. Shalit)

UPDATE July 4th: As the timeline set by the militants passes, according to them, the discussion is closed: "Whether he will be killed or not killed, we will not disclose any information about the fate of the soldier." The links have now been officially severed with the Egyptian mediators. And all this passed through Hamas' official spokesmen, who apparently do not have "any idea" where the soldier is being held. What absolute BS!

UPDATE II: The Swiss perk up to slam Israel for purportedly violating International law by attacking Gaza. What a surprise that the Swiss Government issued no such statements when Israelis were under constant attack from the Gaza strip. The 'stop or I'll say stop again' army of European apologists have reared their ugly heads again.

Related on ATB:

The Trilogy
'Israel Cannot Succeed By Empowering Terrorists'
'Pallywood Does Not Recognize Israel
'The Palestinian-Spin-Of-The-Century' The World's Most Audacious Marketing Coup'

Total War

Comments

[Love]

The Temple of Love - The World Peace Religion
http://www.thetempleoflove.com
is the only way out of this mess.

[Ghost Dansing]

Since I've seen his decapitation and decaptitated head here:

Holofernes (Hebrew, הולופרנס) was an Assyrian invading general of Nebuchadnezzar, who appears in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith.

The Assyrian king Nebuchadrezzar dispatched his general Holofernes to take vengeance on the nations of the west who had withheld their assistance to his reign. Holofernes proceeds to attack Bethulia, a city (possibly Meselieh), which was close to surrender until it was saved by Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow. Judith entered the camp of Holofernes and ingratiated herself with him. Judith then beheaded Holofernes while he was drunk. She returned to Bethulia with the decapitated head, and the Jews subsequently defeated the attacking enemy. Many scholars believe that this story is fictional and thus Holofernes is considered to be a fictional character but not all scholars agree with this view.

The interplay of nationalism and religion are complex. In some ways it appears different than what emerged and is emerging in other inter-ethnic conflicts; the Balkans, India-Pakistan, Iraq, and others throughout history...perhaps even as far back as the rivalries that occured in the Levant at the time of Nebuchadrezzar..even before that...Perhaps it it the history of the world itself...sometime I think it is the story of humankind the Bible tells.

However, is the difference not one mainly of intensity, and the blatant dictatorship of history each side intends to impose on the other? Is it perhaps, rather than being "different" than other conflicts, it is an archtype of conflict, revealing the commonality, the subtratum and dynamics of conflict; inextricable from the human condition itself?

Interestingly... Islamic extremisms quarrel with the West is a quarrel between an advocacy for religious extremism, and a world in which religious extremism has taken only shallow root...it is a quarrel with Secular Liberal Democracy...not so much with Christianity...perhaps there is a realization that the insights of Christianity is what spawned the spread of Secular Liberal Democratic forms of government...however that would only indirectly implicate Christianity itself as the object of hatred.

Indeed, what I find fascinating is the conflict in the Middle East begs a difference that I've pointed out in this forum...the difference between religion as a social structure within which furthers spiritual endeavors and growth, and religion coopted to political purpose...

Arthur Hertzberg indicated in "The Fate of Zionism: A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine", Jewish nationalism began as a nonreligious movement aimed at confronting the problems of anti-Semitism and Jewish homelessness. It was not until Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 that many Zionists began to see something of the miraculous in the endurance of the Jewish state, and Zionism acquired an overlay of religious messianism.

In a way, both the victors and the vanquished agreed on the religious significance of the war. Islamists argued that the Arabs’ defeat was divine punishment for their secular politics, for the loss of Muslim faith. After the failure of secular pan-Arabism in 1967, Arab nationalism gave way to Islamic fundamentalism. The region’s religious conflict, then, was born on what some have called “the seventh day of the Six-Day War.”

Hertzberg saw a path forward only by returning to the older, secular quarrel. “If there is ever to be a road to peace,” he writes, “the conflict must be secularized.” Israelis and Palestinians “can come to peace with each other — even to some semblance of coexistence — only if they accept the modest aims of secular nationalism.”

In truth, however, the aims of secular Arab nationalism were never especially modest. Gamal Abdel-Nasser, the repository of all the Arab secularists’ hopes, closed the Strait of Tiran and prompted the 1967 war “to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and to restore the honor of the Arabs of Palestine.”

Find more of this historical context here:

http://www.theamericanscene.com/pubs/pr8-904.html

In the present era, threats to global order tend to emerge more from the fault lines within societies than the borders between them. In such an environment, the Zionist prescription — social reform in the light of political necessity — takes on a special urgency.

The confrontation becomes dogmatic and ideological, missing political pragmatism of any nature. Liberal Democratic Government is the secular moderator for extremism...political and/or religious...Liberal Democratic Governmental structure is a pragmatic necessity for solutions crossing ethnic, religious and political fault lines.

The cycle of violence is the alternative...obviously cycles can continue for millenia, as long as there is progeny available to carry the grudge forward in time.

[Rightwing guy]

you could level Gaza and it would be no big loss to the world

[mac Brachman]

Once again reading your website has provided me with comfort. I also enjoyed the links, especially the "Proud Member Apes and Pigs Alliance."

My bottom line is this: there are about 12 million Jews in the world, with the number shrinking due to intermarriage, etc. There are about 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, with the numbers growing. Muslims began with small communities in the Arabian peninsula and, through a combination of conquest, gentle persuasion, and (in the early, golden days of Islam) tolerance expanded in all directions, converting many areas of the world to Islam and sometimes destroying ancient civilizations and folkways in the process. Islam began a decline several centuries ago, as its last large-scale imperial ruler, the Ottoman Turks, became corrupt and decadent. Through no fault of the Jews, the last Islamic empire was dismantled after 1918- the Ottomans made the mistake of siding with the Central Powers (Kaiser-led Germany and the Hapsburg empire, both themselves internally unstable) and losing the Great War (before we learned to number our world wars). The old regions of the Ottoman empire were mostly occupied by European powers and administered from there. Turkey itself became, under the vociferously secular Attaturk, a secular nation. Islam turned inward, paranoid, obscurantist, blaming others for its misfortunes. In one way or another, such attitudes are pervasive throughout the Muslim world, with the hoary and very unoriginal addition of latter-day Jew-hatred. But I ask the Muslims, does your view of Allah and virtue and being righteous not allow for you to live side-by-side with the tiny community of Jews, whom you outnumber 125 to 1? You cannot live with that sort of lopsided number? Then what sort of people are you, and what sort of religion is Islam?

Sincerely,

Mac Brachman

[Darrell]

Is this PR campaign effective? Only to the Left because lies and rationalization are sine qua non to their existence. The rest of us see no moderates on the Palestinian side, when they're all dedicated to the destruction of Israel. The Left sees Arabs as an expendable tool for their world domination. The MSM just tries to facilitate this strategy. They count on people being tired of hearing about the conflict and just wishing it would all go away--regardless of the outcome or the consequences. The war on terror can't be won until we open a second front--against the Left.

[Jeremayakovka]

Look how her hair is subsumed into the background. Having severed the head her own is transformed drastically. What, in jihad, can contemplate these acts the way this painting does?

[mika.]

Jihadi terror groups are proxy armies pressed into service by handlers in jihadi sponsoring states. Most of these groups are directly controlled by the Secret Service apparatus in those jihadi sponsoring states.

[Barry Meislin]

Great post.

You have succinctly and accurately described the central flaw at the heart of Middle East reportage, and the world view it has helped to spawn, since September 2000 (though one could go back to Oslo, as well), viz., the obstinate refusal of the MSM to point out that the Palestinian goal is to erase the Jewish state.

Indeed, ignoring and/or denying this longstanding and non-negotiable goal of Israel's destruction has been and continues to be the pre-requisite for believing the very best of the Palestinians while imputing the very worst to Israel.

As has been the case since September 2000 (if not before).

The irony, or one of them, is that the longer the conflict continues---and the aim is to continue it until the knockout blow can be struck---the more progressives in the west will have been able to convince themselves that the Palestinians are increasingly justified in wanting to destroy an Israel that is perceived as wanting to continue oppressing Palestinians while fiercely opposing Palestinian statehood.

One, however, must give a lot of credit to Arafat, his lieutenants and successors, who have succeeded in equating, in the eyes of so many myriads of pious moralists, Palestinian attempts to eliminate Israel with Israel's attempts to prevent it, even as Israel has been trying to create a non-belligerent, viable, Palestinian state on Israel's borders.

One can only expect, alas, that the lies--pious and otherwise--of the well meaning and the less than well meaning will continue. Until the decisive conflagration occurs.

[epaminondas]

Israel should simply FORMALLY declare it recognizes no difference between these idiotic 'armed wings' and political wings.

They are all Yassin. All Muslim Brotherhood.

There is one playbook. It's 1400 years old.

If the KKK was in charge of the Christianity, this is what we would have on Sundays.

Kill them.

There is no way to make it gentle, uncruel, not hideous...
"If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking. "

This IS war. Anything else is folly and guarateed to lose.