Hamas has changed its position, requested and maintained ceasefires, agreed to a truce and refrained from violence. Israel has not.
Thats the bottom line. Actions speak louder than words on a charter
Actions like sending rockets into Israel because of the death of one palestinian is not only strategically stupid but yes as you say speaks volumes. They are not interested on building the very difficult path to peace. The following speaks VOLUMES and shows your statement of their newly found 'peaceful' intentions and 'reinventing' themselves as pure horse shit! They should have the balls to really do it, just like the IRA did. Their actions of handing over their arsenal and not responding to violence with violence in the interest of a peace settlement was real. Hamas is bullshit! Read the following and pretend if you wish, that Hamas has turned a new leaf when in 2008 Hamas makes statements like this "their fate is their vanishing'. The truth in black and white can hurt sometimes:
The Hamas Charter (1988)
Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant provides the following quotation, attributed to Mohammed:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
Article 22 claims that the French revolution, the Russian revolution, colonialism and both world wars were created by the Zionists or forces supportive of Zionism:
"You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it."
Article 32 of the Covenant refers to an antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion:
"Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."
Statements by Hamas leaders and clerics associated with Hamas
In an interview translated by MEMRI that aired on Al-Aqsa TV on April 9, 2008, Hamas Culture Minister Atallah Abu Al-Subh stated that " The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the faith that every Jew harbors in his heart".
Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, in a column in the weekly newspaper Al Risalah in 2008 discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that
"suffering by fire is the Jews' destiny in this world and the next." Astal concluded
"Therefore we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.
In 2008 Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas said in his sermon at the Katib Wilayat mosque in Gaza that "Jews are a people who cannot be trusted. They have been traitors to all agreements. Go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing."
In an editorial in The Guardian in January 2006, Khaled Meshaal, the chief of Hamas's political bureau stated:
"Our message to the Israelis is this: We do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion "the people of the book" who have a covenant from God and his messenger, Muhammad (peace be upon him), to be respected and protected." "Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us — our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society and banished our people."
A report by MEMRI from 2002 states that the Hamas monthly Falastin Al-Muslima had published in September 1996 a series of articles by Ibrahim Al-'Ali on how Allah punished the Jews of the village of Iliya for violation of the Sabbath by transforming them into animals such as "apes, pigs, mice, and lizards". They were also punished by not being able to reproduce. According to MEMRI, the author stated that "The transformation was actual" and not metaphoric. Al-'Ali goes on to say that although they did not reproduce the punishment "left its mark in the souls of the Jews who came after them".
The Guardian reported Khaled Meshaal's statement that, "As a Palestinian today I speak of a Palestinian and Arab demand for a state on 1967 borders. It is true that in reality there will be an entity or state called Israel on the rest of Palestinian land."
In the same article, Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian prime minister, was quoted as saying, "Israel is there, it is part of the United Nations and we do not deny its existence. But we still have rights and land there which have been usurped and until these matters are dealt with we will withhold our recognition,"
Statements on the Holocaust
In 2008, Basim Naim, the minister of health in the Hamas government in Gaza, said "But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history.
We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality."
In 2005, Khaled Mashaal called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's December 14, 2005 statements on the Holocaust (that Europeans had "created a myth in the name of Holocaust") as "courageous."
According to MEMRI, In 2003 Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi published an article in the Hamas weekly Al-Risala in which he called the Holocaust "the false Holocaust" and "the greatest of lies". In this article Rantisi expressed support to Holocaust deniers Roger Garaudy, David Irving, Gerd Honsik, and Fredrick Töben, and to the idea that the gas chambers were a myth. Rantisi also stated that "the Nazis received tremendous financial aid from the Zionist banks and monopolies, and this contributed to their rise to power", and accused the Jewish-owned Berlin-based investment bank Mendelssohn & Co. of funding the Nazis, calling it a "Zionist bank".
In an open letter to Gaza Strip UNRWA chief John Ging published August 20, 2009, the movement's Popular Committees for Refugees called the Holocaust "a lie invented by the Zionists," adding that the group refused to let Gazan children study about it.
Hamas leader Younis al-Astal said that having the Holocaust included in the UNRWA curriculum for Gaza students amounted to "marketing a lie and spreading it." Al-Astal continued "I do not exaggerate when I say this issue is a war crime, because of how it serves the Zionist colonizers and deals with their hypocrisy and lies."
Senior Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri stated his objection to the inclusion of what he referred to as the "so-called Holocaust" in the lesson plan. He continued
"we think it's more important to teach Palestinians the crimes of the Israeli occupation."
Academic analysis
In 1994, Esther Webman of the Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at the Tel Aviv University wrote:
"....the anti-Semitic rhetoric in Hamas leaflets is frequent and intense. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism is not the main tenet of Hamas ideology. Generally no differentiation was made in the leaflets between Jew and Zionist, in as much as Judaism was perceived as embracing Zionism, although in other Hamas publications and in interviews with its leaders attempts at this differentiation have been made."
This idea of "international law" is silly. Btw, Turkey didn't sign it either
