While Hamas turns Gaza into an Islamist state, the Western media praise it for keeping 'law and order'

Michael Weiss
The Telegraph
21 April '11

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/michaelweiss/100084674/while-hamas-turns-gaza-into-an-islamist-state-the-western-media-praise-it-for-keeping-law-and-order/#dsq-content

When Vittorio Arrigoni was abducted and killed last week in Gaza, the press wasted little time establishing its line that Hamas has done a great job of maintaining law and order.

In the words of the Financial Times’s Tobias Buck, Gaza is now “a safe destination for foreign journalists, aid workers and diplomats.” Conal Urquhart of the Guardian noted that, since winning its first parliamentary election in 2006, Hamas has gone “mainstream.” The real nasties in the Strip are now said to be the “puritanical” Salafi-Jihadis, Koranic literalists with possible ties to al-Qaeda who think Hamas is run by softies no better than bearded Zionists.

Unfortunately, there are several problems with this analysis.

The first is that most Salafi-Jihadis used to belong to Hamas themselves, particularly the hardline military wing, the Al Qassam Brigades. Hamas admits this freely: an International Crisis Group report on Radical Islam in Gaza suggests that 60 per cent of imprisoned Salafi-Jihadis are former Hamas members. Is this why one of the four suspects in the Arrigoni murder, Mohammed al-Salfiti, is an active Hamas policeman?

Hamas has not only created the conditions in Gaza that breed schismatic ultras but also has long record of encouraging Salafi-Jihadis. An early group was Jaysh al-Islam (“Army of Islam”). Jaysh became famous in 2007 when it kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston and held him captive for nearly four months. Hamas was newly in control of a de facto government and reckoned that Johnston’s detention was too high a PR price to pay for ownership of Gaza. It issued an ultimatum to Jaysh to release Johnston. Jaysh’s response was to threaten to go public with details of its collaboration with Hamas, including plots to assassinate Palestinian Authority officials.

Gaza extremists want war on Jews of Yemen

Bataween
Point of No Return
23 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

There's nothing like Jew-hatred to unite terrorist groups. Haaretz reports that a group of Al-Qaeda sympathisers in Gaza has called on their fellow Salafists to wage war on the few beleaguered Jews still living in northern Yemen. (Why? Because they hate Hamas - such is the tortured nature of terrorist politics.) By the way, these are the Jews whom Britain recently said they would take in - or not.

A group of Muslim extremists in the Gaza Strip that is opposed to Hamas has called on Al-Qaida in Yemen to target Jews there in an effort to drive them from their country - part of what the group described as its war against Jews.

According to e-mails sent by a person identifying himself as Ali Hussein, who says he represents A group of Shi'ite guerrillas in northern Yemen opposed to Al-Qaida, a Salafi group based in the Gaza Strip and calling itself the "Abu Amir" group is allegedly calling for attacks on Jewish leaders in northern Yemen. As proof, Hussein sent a scanned hand-written note naming the Jewish targets in Yemen.

(Read full story)

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