HAL9000 wrote:Ibrahim wrote:HAL9000 wrote:It did not happen, but the fact is that had it happened,
Do you see the problem with this? How can a hypothetical scenario be factual?
The fact that you don't care does not change the truth.
1) The "truth" of a hypothetical scenario?
Your argument that the Suras of Quran supersede the currently fashionable antisemitic Hadiths, does not seem to help to convince Hamas and many Arab groups to change their minds, for in this kind of thinking is at the core of their beliefs.
2) You seem to think that the root of Hamas' attitude towards Israel is religious. , when clearly they have other objectives and motivations.
[Emphasis added by HAL 9000]
2) If you are referring to the chronological root of Hamas' attitude towards Israel (before Hamas was formed, although many of its members were around at the beginning of the conflict after 1947) , then you might be partially right. But currently, the "root" of Hamas' attitude morphed into a direct antisemitism that is beginning to become an integral part of the grievances.
Here is a version of the Hamas' charter (this is from 1988, and it is possible that they toned down their antisemitic statements slightly, but essentially the religious interpretations that they are bringing into politics is the same). Note that the main tenet of Hamas' is still not hunting down the Jews, but to get all the land and make it without Jews.
However, religious antisemitism became an integral part of their charter that is used to super-charge their motivations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas#Anti ... ti-Zionism
EXCERPT:
Antisemitism and anti-Zionism
See also: Racism in the Palestinian territories
According to academic Esther Webman, antisemitism is not the main tenet of Hamas ideology, although antisemitic rhetoric is frequent and intense in Hamas leaflets. The leaflets generally do not differentiate between Jews and Zionists. In other Hamas publications and in interviews with its leaders attempts at this differentiation have been made.[223] In 2009 representatives of the small Jewish sect Neturei Karta met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniya in Gaza, who stated that he held nothing against Jews but only against the state of Israel.[224]
Hamas Charter (1988)
Main article: Hamas Covenant
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."[225]
Article 22 states 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."[226]
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."[225]
Statements by Hamas members and clerics
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.".[68][227]
Another Hamas legislator and imam, Sheik Yunus al-Astal, discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that "suffering by fire is the Jews' destiny in this world and the next". He concluded "Therefore we are sure that the Holocaust is still to come upon the Jews".[68][227]
In January 2009, Gazan Hamas Health Minister Basim Naim published a letter in The Guardian, stating that Hamas has no quarrel with Jewish people, only with the actions of Israel.[228]
In May 2009, senior Hamas MP Sayed Abu Musameh said that "in our culture, we respect every foreigner, especially Jews and Christians, but we are against Zionists, not as nationalists but as fascists and racists."[229]
Following the rededication of the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem in March 2010, senior Hamas figure al-Zahar called on Palestinians everywhere to observe five minutes of silence "for Israel's disappearance and to identify with Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa mosque." He further stated stated that "Wherever you have been you've been sent to your destruction. You've killed and murdered your prophets and you have always dealt in loan-sharking and destruction. You've made a deal with the devil and with destruction itself – just like your synagogue." [230][231]
On 8 January 2012, during a visit to Tunis, Gazan Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh told The Associated Press on that he disagrees with the anti-Semitic slogans. "We are not against the Jews because they are Jews. Our problem is with those occupying the land of Palestine," he said. "There are Jews all over the world, but Hamas does not target them.".[232]
In response to a statement by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas that Hamas preferred non-violent means and had agreed to adopt "peaceful resistance," Hamas contradicted Abbas. According to Hamas spokesman Sami Abu-Zuhri, "We had agreed to give popular resistance precedence in the West Bank, but this does not come at the expense of armed resistance."[233]
On August 10, 2012, Ahmad Bahr, Deputy Speaker of the Hamas Parliament, stated in a sermon which aired on Al-Aqsa TV that:
If the enemy sets foot on a single square inch of Islamic land, Jihad becomes an individual duty, incumbent on every Muslim, male or female. A woman may set out [on Jihad] without her husband's permission, and a servant without his master's permission. Why? In order to annihilate those Jews...Oh Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one.[234][235][236][237]
Statements on the Holocaust
Hamas has been explicit in its Holocaust Denial. In reaction to the Stockholm conference on the Jewish Holocaust, held in late January 2000, Hamas issued a press release which it published on its official website, containing the following statements from a senior leader:
This conference bears a clear Zionist goal, aimed at forging history by hiding the truth about the so-called Holocaust, which is an alleged and invented story with no basis. (...) The invention of these grand illusions of an alleged crime that never occurred, ignoring the millions of dead European victims of Nazism during the war, clearly reveals the racist Zionist face, which believes in the superiority of the Jewish race over the rest of the nations. (...) By these methods, the Jews in the world flout scientific methods of research whenever that research contradicts their racist interests.[238]
In August 2003, senior Hamas official Dr Abd Al-Aziz Al-Rantisi wrote in the Hamas newspaper Al-Risala that the Zionists encouraged murder of Jews by the Nazis with the aim of forcing them to immigrate to Palestine.[239]
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"[240]) as "courageous."[241] Later in 2008, Basim Naim, the minister of health in the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government in Gaza countered holocaust denial, and said "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."[242]
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.[243] Hamas leader Younis al-Astal continued by saying 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."[244][245]
In February 2011, Hamas voiced opposition to UNRWA's teaching of the Holocaust in Gaza. According to Hamas, "Holocaust studies in refugee camps is a contemptible plot and serves the Zionist entity with a goal of creating a reality and telling stories in order to justify acts of slaughter against the Palestinian people."[246][247]
In July 2012, Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, denounced a visit by Ziad al-Bandak, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to the Auschwitz death camp, saying it was "unjustified" and "unhelpful" and only served the "Zionist occupation" while coming "at the expense of a real Palestinian tragedy". He also called the Holocaust an "alleged tragedy".[248][249][250][251]
Thus, regardless of your observation that the Quran itself does not promote antisemitism, Hamas is doing its best to combine various elements from Islam to profit from antisemitism made religious and religion made antisemitic.
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Now let me address your comment 1) above. You basically deleted part of my full sentence that "If the people who established Israel were Muslim Arabs from Egypt instead of Jews, then the outrage against Israel's existence in the Islamic world (minus Palestinians) would have been considerably less severe." You only quoted the hypothesis "If only Muslim Arabs had settled in Israel instead of Jews".
But my point was never a hypothesis A, but the truth of the logical formula " IF A THEN B " as the proof that there is a double-standard.
Since you don't like my claim (the logical formula's truth, not the truth of the hypothesis), then this time let me give a concrete example that has already happened in 1974.
In 1974, the Cypriot Greek fascist leader Nikos Sampson launched a coup to overthrow the government in an attempt to unite Cyprus with Greece. On this occasion he also launched a brutal campaign to ethnically cleanse and also exterminate the Ethnic Turkish minority in Cyprus. Then Turkey intervened and invaded the Northern Part of Cyrpus (40 % approximately) and this actually saved the lives of thousands of ethnic Turks who were in the Island. At that time I was a child in Turkey and I applauded this military intervention because of the fascist coup perpetrated by Nikos Sampson. Incidentally, many years late,r before Sampson died from natural causes, he stated that if Turkey had not intervened, he would have liquidated all the ethnic Turks in Cyprus.
But separately, not only the 40 % of Cyprus that Turkey invaded was a lot more land than that originally belonged to the ethnic Turks in the island, but in addition, the Turkish government that was jointly operated by Professor Dr. Erbakan and the leftist coalition partner Mr. Ecevit, also brought in up to 120,000 Anatolian peasants to settle in Cyprus, to bolster the Turkish minority there.
Bringing in settlers from Anatolia was illegal according to the international law, but NATO did not punish Turkey too much (some arms shipments were delayed from the US) because of Turkey's strategic military importance during the Cold War. But in addition, the Muslim world did not say anything either. In the West Bank there are approximately 400,000 Jewish settlers, which is more than the alleged 120,000 settlers from Anatolia who went to Cyprus, but the scales of these numbers are comparable. I can see that you also do not object to this kind of land grab, even though you are spending a lot of time criticizing Jews in Palestine for having stolen land. This demonstrates that you have a double-standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus
EXCERPT:
Turkish settlers
As a result of the Turkish invasion, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe stated that the demographic structure of the island has been continuously modified as a result of the deliberate policies of the Turks. Following the occupation of Northern Cyprus, civilian settlers from Turkey began arriving on the island. Despite the lack of consensus on the exact figures, all parties concerned admitted that Turkish nationals began systematically arriving in the northern part of the island in 1975.[84] It was suggested that over 120,000 settlers were brought into Cyprus from mainland Turkey.[84] This was despite Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupier from transferring or deporting parts of its own civilian population into an occupied territory.
UN Resolution 1987/19 (1987) of the "Sub-Commission On Prevention Of Discrimination And Protection Of Minorities", which was adopted on 2 September 1987, demanded "the full restoration of all human rights to the whole population of Cyprus, including the freedom of movement, the freedom of settlement and the right to property" and also expressed "its concern also at the policy and practice of the implantation of settlers in the occupied territories of Cyprus which constitute a form of colonialism and attempt to change illegally the demographic structure of Cyprus".
In a report prepared by Mete Hatay on behalf of PRIO, the Oslo peace center, it was estimated that the number of Turkish mainlanders in the north who have been granted the right to vote is 37,000. This figure however excludes mainlanders who are married to Turkish Cypriots or adult children of mainland settlers as well as all minors. The report also estimates the number of Turkish mainlanders who have not been granted the right to vote, whom it labels as "transients", at a further 105,000.[85]
.............
that you mentioned..
