SOURCE: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/finding-moral-light-through-a-tangle/
Those of us who oppose Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza, who are revolted by the pictures and reports of the mangled bodies and miseries of Palestinian children, dare not let Hamas off the hook because the residents of Gaza are victims. Don’t forget what Hamas professes and what it does. Many things are true about Hamas even if you don’t like the people who say them. Keep all this in your mind.
For example, here’s a clip of Hamas MP Fathi Hammad on Al-Aqsa television, February 29, 2008, bragging about Hamas using women and children, among others, as human shields:
“[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahedeen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahedeen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: “We desire death like you desire life.””
I checked out the translation with two Arabic speakers, who confirm that it is accurate. Hussein Ibish, Executive Director of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership and a Senior Fellow of the American Task Force on Palestine, e-mails me that “such declarations are in keeping with a good deal of the rhetoric of Hamas and some of its supporters.”
