MUST READ: THE TALE OF FOUR OP-EDS

A Tale Of Four Op-Eds
Prof. Barry Rubin
July 17, 2007

" The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims," proclaimed the Communist Manifesto a century and a half ago. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” But this was before the age of public relations. Here is how it’s done today.

Recently, the three main city-based newspapers in America ran op-eds by Hamas leaders. First, the exact same article by Ahmed Yousef, an advisor to the man who had headed the Palestinian Authority, appeared the same day, June 27, in the Washington Post and New York Times.

This is an extremely unusual development and it turned out, according to Washington Post editors, that Hamas’s public relations’ agent had fooled them by not informing either newspaper that the other was publishing. It was not the last time that Hamas would fool them.

The idea of the op-ed article is to let an individual or group express its opinion directly, without the mediation of the newspaper’s reporters or editors. In this sense, the Yousef pieces were not op-eds and should not have been published. The reason is that they had nothing whatsoever to do with the thoughts or actions of Hamas. They were, rather, merely free advertising copy.

Hamas is a radical Islamist group which seeks the extinction of the state of Israel through terrorist means. It is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a point we will return to later. Hamas is very anti-Western and anti-American. The group uses antisemitic imagery, encourages children to become suicide bombers, seeks an Islamist state roughly along the lines of those in Iran or in Afghanistan under the Taliban, and says or does other things that do not fit with Western democracy.

One would never guess any of these things, however, from the June 27 op-eds. They seemed to have been written by a public relations’ agency and one can doubt that anyone in the Hamas leadership even read them, much less agreed with them. Since these articles are completely disinformation, they do not reflect Hamas’s doctrines, policy, or strategy. As a result, they are worthless for anything other than mobilizing support for the group and disguising its nature. This is not the purpose of op-ed articles.

What Yousef wrote was a remarkable example of--well, one cannot find a better word than the strangely fitting “chutzpah” to describe it. He asked for U.S. support for Hamas, without any change in Hamas’s program or acknowledgement of past error, of course. Hamas was presented as an example of American-style democracy at work. The Hamas coup against its Fatah coalition partners is presented as necessary to save Gaza from the “horrific” civil war which Hamas itself helped set off. Hamas is portrayed as the victim of Fatah terrorism, not mentioning of course Hamas’s own acts of violence. Fatah is presented as an American and Israeli puppet group acting against the Palestinians’ “thirst for political freedom.” One can only wait with bated breath the future free elections Hamas will hold.

Yousef then raises a new theme which we will hear more of later: Hamas is the moderate, al-Qaida are the radicals1. This theme is already being parroted in the American media, as in the Los Angeles Times story from Gaza of July 13: “Hamas says it disavows Islamic radicalism but faces tension between its religious hard-liners and pragmatists who want to convince the West that it is not a political mask for jihad2.”

But Yousef’s clear intention is to appeal to Americans by suggestion that al-Qaida kills Westerners while Hamas only murders Israelis. He states:

“I defy [Hamas’s critics] to demonstrate one instance in which Hamas's military structure has struck against any force outside the theatre of the occupation. The struggle has always been against the Israeli agenda of ethnic cleansing and conquest. Hamas is a movement of Palestinian liberation and nationalism -- Islamist, yes, but in the sea of contending faiths that is the homeland, where is the sin in loving one's creed?”

This paragraph is worth serious analysis. First, of course, it signals subtly (though no innocent observer will notice) that Israelis can be killed anywhere since for Hamas all of Israel is the “theatre of the occupation.” Second, he certainly cannot mention Israel’s prior withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and plan to pull out of most of the West Bank--not to mention Israel’s peace offer at the 2000 Camp David summit--because they belie his claims. Third, he claims for Hamas the leadership of Palestinian nationalism, thus stealing Fatah’s clothes. And finally, he equates being an Islamist--demanding a state totally ruled by the rulers’ interpretation of Islam--as equivalent to loving one’s religion. Hamas is reinvented as Southern Baptists.

What is most interesting of all, though, is the idea that Hamas only attacks Israel and thus has nothing against the United States. This is deliberately misleading. As noted above, Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Hamas slogan in this regard has been that it is the job of Hamas to eliminate Israel and the job of its allied Muslim Brotherhoods elsewhere to overthrow the existing regimes and replace them with anti-American Islamist ones. In Lebanon, a special case, Hamas supports Hizballah. Thus, the disinterest in attacking other targets is not due to moderation or potential friendship but merely a division of labor. Hamas has a big enough job without taking on other assignments. And even given all this, Farfur--the Hamas version of Mickey Mouse--told the kiddies on Hamas television that the group’s ultimate goal was a world ruled by Islam3.

Then, even in the context of his argument so far, Yousef comes up with a whopper which I am willing to wager would only provoke mirth among Hamas leaders: “Palestinians want, on their terms, the same thing Western societies want: self-determination, modernity, access to markets and their own economic power, and freedom for civil society to evolve.”

Well, no, Hamas wants total victory, Israel’s destruction, and an Islamist state. Unless it gets that outcome it is willing to sacrifice self-determination (rejecting a two-state solution, or at least defining self-determination only in terms of getting everything), modernity (does Hamas want a `modern’ Western-style society or even a modern Jordanian or Egyptian-style one? No), economic progress (it is willing to see Gaza flattened in pursuit of its endless armed struggle), and freedom (any freedom outside of Islamic norms will be squashed). This is merely trying to appeal to Westerners at one of their most gullible weak points: Hey! We’re just like you. We want our children to be happy (then why teach them that being a suicide bomber is the highest of all callings?) and to be prosperous. As President George Bush said, “We all want the same things.”

Everything is blamed on the United States, of course, and its embargo against the Hamas regime. But of course Yousef cannot confront the real issue: even if Hamas had given the most hypocritical lip-service to recognizing Israel in principle as part of an eventual peace agreement, the embargo would have fallen within days. Hamas could easily have ended the pressure, even with the sort of wink-nod, English-only statements that Yasir Arafat did for the PLO. Hamas did not want to do this because its advantage was its intransigence. And its intransigence is what it is paying public relations’ people to conceal, with the help of the Washington Post and New York Times.

...


Barry Rubin is Director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center university. His latest book, The Truth about Syria was published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May 2007.



Pertinent Links:

1) The Tale of Four Op-Eds

2) Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center