Today’s WaPo contains a hard-hitting op-ed from Hamas’s Mahmoud Zahhar, the foreign minister in the Gaza-based PA caretaker government. Zahhar is leading a six-man Hamas delegation that yesterday crossed from Gaza into Egypt with the objective of meeting Pres. Jimmy Carter there today. Carter is then expected to proceed to Damascus, to meet overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal there, tomorrow.
Of note in Zahhar’s op-ed:
- 1. He writes nothing there about the possibility of a limited ceasefire (tahdi’eh) with Israel, over Gaza. This indicates to me that he thinks the probability of reaching such an arrangement have plummeted.
2. He strongly criticizes the campaign “the US-Israeli alliance” has waged to “negate the results of the January 2006 elections.” A justifiable criticism.
3. He applauds Carter for saying that Hamas needs to be at the negotiating table “without any preconditions” if any peace effort is to succeed.
4. But he also lays out a stiff Hamas precondition: that “the starting point for just negotiations” is that Israel should “first” withdraw completely to the pre-1967 borders.
5. He goes to some length to connect the Palestinians’ present struggle with Jewish history, comparing the present actions of Gaza’s people with the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and speaking of his respect for the “modern proponents of tikkun olam.”
6. He writes movingly of his two sons, killed in the struggle against Israeli occupation, and describes a long time-frame for the Palestinian struggle: “Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begin, and adversity has taught us patience.”
It’s good that the WaPo published this piece, allowing this senior Hamas leader to speak in his own words on their pages. But the paper’s editors evidently decided to take a leaf out of the “hosting etiquette” book written by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, when he invited Pres. Ahmadinejad to speak there recently. Speaking in their own voice on the editorial page the editors launch a diatribe against Zahhar– and even more so against Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas. In doing that, they twist Zahhar’s words to give them the worst possible meaning.
One example of that: Zahhar wrote, “Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West.” As any cursory glance at the news reports would reveal, that attack was carried out by a non-Hamas group. But the WaPo editorial accuses of Zahhar of having “endorsed” the attack, which his carefully chosen wording explicitly did not do– and it even accuses Hamas of having carried it out. It also accuses Hamas of “deliberate targeting of civilians, such as the residents of the Israeli town of Sderot.” That, despite reports from Israelis in the know like Daniel Levy that the security forces judge that Hamas avoids targeting civilians.
Again and again, the editorial twists Zahhar’s words and Hamas’s over-all position. But its authors seem to be doing this mainly in order to fuel the particular object of their ire and derision, Jimmy Carter. What a sad situation.
There is a mean-spirited and extremely biased “gotcha” aspect to the way the WaPo treated Zahhar on its pages– very similar to the way Bollinger treated Ahmadinejad. There were a hundred ways the paper’s editors could have published Zahhar’s essay while dissociating themselves from any suspicions readers might have had that they supported his views– but without resorting to twisting his words to use them to launch their own very vicious attack on Carter, as they did.
Meanwhile, two stories on the paper’s news pages give a fairly well-reported picture of the situation in both the West Bank and Gaza. In this story, Griff White writes about the recent death in the Fateh securoity forces’ custody of the pro-Hamas West Bank preacher Sheikh Majid al-Barghouthi.
White writes:
- eyewitness accounts, photographs, video and an independent Palestinian investigation released this month suggested that he was tortured to death during his February detention.
He also gives considerably more background to the case, starting his article with this:
- When the preacher’s body arrived at the hospital, his back was scarlet where he had been whipped with pipes. His legs were black with bruises. His wrists were sliced open and bloodied…
In a separate story, White wrote about the latest escalation in Gaza:
- Eighteen Palestinians — many of them civilians — and three Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday during fierce clashes in the Gaza Strip, marking the deadliest day of fighting in more than a month…
One of those killed was Fadel Shana, a 23-year-old cameraman with the Reuters news agency.
The latest Zionist terror attack on Gaza reportedly killed at least 5 chidlren in addition to the hundreds of other children slaughtered since the lastest Infitada began.
Child killers are generally considered the lowest form of human life, but apparently it is OK with our politcal elites when the “chosen people” do it.
The latest Zionist terror attack on Gaza reportedly killed at least 5 chidlren in addition to the hundreds of other children slaughtered since the lastest Infitada began.
Child killers are generally considered the lowest form of human life, but apparently it is OK with our politcal elites when the “chosen people” do it.
“Child killers are generally considered the lowest form of human life, but apparently it is OK with our politcal elites when the “chosen people” do it.”
It’s also quite “acceptable” when American troops do it in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh, it’s “regrettable” and all that, but it just can’t be helped. After all, it is not the children they are targetting, it is the “suspected insurgents” (sic). The fact that they take out several civilians for each “suspected insurgent” is unfortunate and all that, but what’s a poor invader to do?
What difference does it make which free lance group is doing the actual firing? If Hamas says they can’t control their actions, then what is the point of negotiating with them?