Hamas: We are Not Terrorists; We Just Want to Destroy Israel

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Hamas leaders are working hard these days to have their movement removed from the U.S. State Department list for Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

The Hamas leaders are hoping to persuade a number of European Union countries to support their bid.

Hamas wants to be removed from the list without changing its strategy or charter, which call for jihad [holy war] and which do not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

Hamas is also not prepared to dismantle its armed group, Izaddin al-Kassam, as part of its effort to persuade the US and EU to drop it from the list of terrorist groups.

Nor is Hamas prepared to stop smuggling weapons or give up thousands of rockets and mortars that it possesses in various parts of the Gaza Strip.

And of course Hamas is not prepared to renounce violence in the context of its effort to seek legitimacy in the international community.

The Hamas initiative comes at a time when senior officials of the movement, including Khaled Mashaal, continue to talk about their dream of replacing Israel with an Islamic state. In addition, they are continuing to call on Palestinians to abide by the “armed resistance” as the only option for achieving their goal.

Ironically, the Hamas request to be removed from the list of terrorist groups coincides with reports about the Islamist movement’s involvement in terror activities in neighboring Egypt.

According to these reports, Hamas was behind the August 2012 killing of 16 Egyptian border guards in Sinai. Hamas has also dispatched thousands of its men to Cairo to protect Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi against his political opponents, the reports revealed.

Although Hamas has denied the reports, there are increased signs that the movement is cooperating with other Islamic fundamentalist groups in Sinai to turn the peninsula into a base for jihadists from different parts of the world. Some of these jihadists are believed to be linked to groups that are affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Hamas claims that it has won the secret backing of a number of EU governments — a claim denied by the EU….

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Obama’s ‘Friends of Hamas’?

By Frank Gaffney, Jr.

….Even more alarming, as Steven Emerson and John Rossomatndo make clear in a must-read analysis of John Brennan’s record published last week by the indispensable Investigative Project on Terrorism (
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3902/obama-cia-nominee-john-brennan-wrong-for-the-job
), the CIA Director-designate himself actually agreed to demands made in 2011 by CAIR and other Islamist and leftist groups to politicize the training of intelligence, law enforcement, homeland security and military personnel.  In a letter dated November 3rd of that year, Brennan promised that an interagency review and new guidelines would “address the valid concerns” raised by this insidious Red-Green axis.

Among other things, the guidelines promulgated under Brennan’s supervision required the purging of hundreds of documents and training materials from the files of the FBI and other agencies on the grounds that they might “offend” Muslims like the Islamists of CAIR and other friends of Hamas.  Experienced trainers like Major Stephen Coughlin – a former advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the nation’s preeminent experts on the enemy threat doctrine of shariah – were barred from providing instruction at the CIA and elsewhere.  And “community partners” (read, senior officials of CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood fronts who profess to be “leaders” of the Muslim-American community) are to be consulted before any trainers or training materials are used to prepare with federal funds to counter “violent extremism.”

Despite this record and myriad other examples of what is, at best, John Brennan’s willful blindness to the threat posed by Islamists and the jihad – both violent and previolent – in which shariah obliges them to engage, not a single member of the Senate Intelligence Committee used its hearing on his appointment last week to question the nominee on this score.  A second hearing on Tuesday, this one behind closed doors, offers another opportunity to do so.  Will it, too, be missed?

During the Cold War – our last epic struggle with a totalitarian ideology, it would have been unimaginable for individuals who were friends of the KGB, or associated with those who were, to have been nominated to lead the Pentagon or the CIA, let alone both.  As Congressman Trent Franks, a member of a courageous group Newt Gingrich has dubbed “the National Security Five,” said on the House floor last week:  “I believe the success of the [Muslim Brotherhood's] ‘stealth jihad’ has been significantly enhanced by remarks and public statements made by John Brennan over the past four years. He should, therefore, not be allowed anywhere near – let alone be given the responsibility for running– America’s premier intelligence agency.”  Amen.

Senator Jim Inhofe has said he will insist on there being sixty votes to confirm Chuck Hagel.  The same should apply to John Brennan and any other friend of Hamas. Because a true friend of Hamas is by definition an enemy of ours.

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Palestinians’ Nazi-Style Youth Movement Prepares for Jihad

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Thousands of Palestinian schoolchildren have been receiving military training in the Gaza Strip to prepare them for jihad against Israel.

According to Mohamed Siam, a senior official with the Hamas-run ministry, some 9,000 high school children have already joined 36 camps throughout the Gaza Strip and are being taught how to use various types of weapons and handle explosives.

Hamas says that the purpose of the camps is to prepare Palestinian children, both militarily and psychologically, for the “liberation of Palestine, from the Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea,” in other words, all of Israel.

How can anyone talk about the two-state solution when thousands of Palestinian children are being trained to use weapons and explosives to replace Israel with an Islamic state? Does Mahmoud Abbas really believe that these schoolchildren will ever accept his strategy of peace with Israel? These are questions the West needs to ask itself before once again pressing for a two-state solution.

The training is being held under the supervision of the Hamas government’s Ministry of Education, and the training camps have been named Al-Futuwwa [spiritual chivalry].

According to Wikipedia, Al-Futuwwa was the name of the Hitler-Jugend [Hitler Youth] style of pan-Arab fascistic and nationalistic youth movement that existed in Iraq in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1938, the Al-Futuwwa youth organization sent a delegate to the Nuremberg Nazi party rally, and in turn hosted the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. In 1941, the fascistic pan-Arab Al-Muthanna Club and its Al-Futuwwa movement participated in the Farhud attack on Baghdad’s Jewish community.

Last week, during a graduation ceremony for thousands of school children, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh declared that his movement was planning to establish a military academy for training and educating seventh and ninth graders. The goal, he said, is to prepare Palestinian children for jihad against the “Zionist entity.”

Addressing the cadets, Haniyeh declared: “You are the future leaders. You will march your people toward freedom and dignity. The Al-Futuwwa will end in victory and the liberation of all Palestine, “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”…

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Hamas’s Talibanization of the Gaza Strip

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Those who thought that Hamas would ever establish a modern and liberal regime in the Gaza Strip received another reminder this week of how the radical Islamist movement is pursuing its effort to create a Taliban-style entity in the territory that has been under its control since 2007.

The reminder came in the form of a decision taken by the Al-Aqsa University administration in the Gaza Strip to force female students to dress in accordance with Islamic teachings.

This means that all female students would be required to wear the hijab or niqab which cover their heads and faces.

This latest measure is part of a Hamas campaign aimed at “inculcating [Islamic] values and virtues” in the Gaza Strip, Hamas officials explained.

As part of this campaign, Hamas last week imposed a ban on low-waist trousers, Western-style haircuts and tight gowns.

The decision to ban low-waist trousers and Western-style haircuts is directed against young Palestinian men in the Gaza Strip, who have apparently been exposed to Western fashions thanks to television and the Internet.

Adel al-Hour, a senior Hamas official, said that his movement was concerned over the spread of low-waist trousers among both men and women in the Gaza Strip. “This phenomenon is alien to the values and traditions of Palestinian society,” he explained.

The Hamas official said that the campaign to enforce Islamic values and virtues was especially designed to “highlight the negative impact of the growing phenomenon of women who dress immodestly in order to highlight their charms.”

Hamas, he added, is also strongly opposed to puff hairstyles that have become popular among young men and women in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas’s latest campaign follows a series of restrictions imposed by the Islamist movement on women in the Gaza Strip over the past few years. These restrictions include a ban on smoking the nargila [waterpipe] in public places, forcing female lawyers to wear the hijab during their appearances in court and prohibiting boutiques from using female model mannequins….

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New Campaign against Rep. Bachmann for Anti-Brotherhood Stance

by CLARE M. LOPEZ

People for the American Way (PFAW) has launched a new campaign against Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who, after her recent re-election to Congress, has been re-appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

A PFAW-sponsored petition with 178,000 signatures is to be presented to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Monday 21 January 2012 to protest Bachmann’s HPSCI appointment.

Citing what PFAW calls “ugly Islamophobic fear mongering,” the petition decries what it alleges are Bachmann’s “unfounded and irresponsible attacks on dedicated public servants.”

Although it does not say so specifically, the PFAW petition likely refers to a set of letters signed by Rep. Bachmann and four Congressional colleagues – Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Tom Rooney (R-FL) and Lynn Westmorland (R-GA).

The letters were sent in June 2012 to the inspectors general of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and State and the Office of the Director of National Security (ODNI). The letters note that U.S. foreign policy has undergone a dramatic shift in the direction of open support for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and question whether that policy shift may be the result of Brotherhood influence operations.

Given that the 2008 Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding case had established with voluminous documentary evidence from the Muslim Brotherhood’s own archives that its mission in America is “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” Congressional requests, most particularly from the HPSCI, that inspectors general look into the possibility of Brotherhood penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government would seem to be most appropriate….

….Huma Abedin, for example, who is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, not only served while a student at George Washington University on the Executive Board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a Muslim Brotherhood front group that is so acknowledged in its own document (The Explanatory Memorandum), but also served for 12 years as the assistant editor of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA), the publication of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA).

Both the IMMA and its journal were founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, whom Andrew McCarthy describes as “a wealthy and influential Saudi academic who became a financier of the al Qaeda terror network as well as the secretary-general of Muslim World League – one of the most significant joint ventures of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi government in terms of spreading Islamic supremacist ideology.”

Then there is Mohamed Magid, the president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front group in the U.S. and named by the Department of Justice an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation HAMAS terror funding trial.

As with Abedin, Magid’s leadership of an acknowledged affiliate of a jihadist organization pledged to “destroying the Western civilization from within” seemed no obstacle to a U.S. government advisory appointment on an issue directly related to jihad. Magid was named a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Working Group” of the Homeland Security Advisory Council in Spring 2010.

Mohamed Elibiary, Magid’s colleague on the DHS Working Group is also a member of the DHS Advisory Council itself. Elibiary has defended Sayyed Qutb, perhaps the foremost theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, and recommended his writings. He also spoke at a December 2004 conference in honor of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini entitled, “A Tribute to a Great Islamic Visionary.”

Abedin, Magid, and Elibiary are but three examples cited with careful and thorough references in the Congressional letters to the inspectors general; all were named to serve in U.S. government positions in which they are expected to provide advice on official policy related to Islamic terrorism….

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