No doubt Benjamin Netanyahu could barely contain his glee when he learned last month about the violent attack in San Bernardino, California. Even though the murderous husband and wife team seem to to have been only “inspired” by ISIS over the internet, Netanyahu must have so happy that he sent out for more of his favorite pistachio ice cream. The tragic killings let him once again hammer home one of his major talking points: Hamas is ISIS.
Unfortunately for him, a brave journalist named Sarah Helm who regularly visits Gaza has just written a remarkable article in the New York Review of Books that destroys his view. “ISIS in Gaza” is a detailed report that should put the New York Times and much of the mainstream media to shame.
In fact, ISIS is starting to emerge in Gaza — but as a sworn enemy of Hamas. Sarah Helm explains,
Hamas members are seen as infidels by ISIS since they place the nationalist battle for a Palestinian state before the campaign for a caliphate.
She goes on to explain that ISIS sabotages Hamas efforts to negotiate cease-fires with Israel:
ISIS supporters inside Gaza have shown their opposition and tried to break the cease-fire by firing rockets into Israel, thereby angering Hamas and risking heavy Israeli retaliation.
Helm includes a fascinating interview with a Salafist Sheikh named Omar Hams, who uses theological arguments to oppose ISIS. He points out that ISIS is not some inevitable consequence of “Islam” but that it was in fact created by the West,
by the thousands of bombs dropped on the heads of Muslims, and by the rejection of democratically elected Muslim governments, such as in Egypt, and by the support for the state that is oppressing us here in Gaza, and that is Israel.
Sheikh Hams warns that ISIS is growing in Gaza, among disillusioned and hopeless youth. His own efforts to oppose it have apparently gotten him condemned as a collaborator by ISIS in Syria, which could jeopardize his physical safety.
Israeli intelligence services are not stupid, and they surely know that Hamas is not ISIS. But instead of trying to negotiate, Benjamin Netanyahu would rather continue his dishonest and dangerous rhetoric. He prefers to see Palestinians — and Israelis — continue to die so he can use the ongoing crisis to hang on to political power.
This is classic Netanyahu modus operandi. He is always trying to equate Hamas with whatever boogieman is flavor of the day in the West, in a churlish attempt to draw attention to poor defenseless little Israel and her imminent destruction and how Israel is both the first and the last line of defense for the rest of the world against these organizations. Before ISIS, he was trying to equate Hamas with Al Qaeda. Before Al Qaeda it was Hezbollah. Before Hezbollah… Well, you get the picture. He and his predecessors have successfully played up bitter U.S. / Iran relations for decades, even though Iran has never been or posed a credible threat to either Israel or the U.S. Just send money, weapons and unlimited diplomatic protection at the UN and UNSC and please just ignore all the land theft, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
South Africa did the same thing during Apartheid. By aligning themselves with the West in the fight against Communisim and its spread in Africa, they bought themselves decades of grace from the U.S., U.K. and European governments. It was no coincendence that within a few years of the Berlin Wall falling the Apartheid regime’s days were over. The U.S. threw them under the bus the moment they no longer had a good, security, political or diplomatic reason to protect them from domestic or international scrutiny and isolation.
If the war on terror ended tomorrow, it would spell doom and the exact same fate would face Israel’s Zionist regime and Netanyahu knows it! So expect much more rhetoric, more pompous gloating after every single terrorist attack and more outrageous and blatant lies to maintain the the status quo and the West’s never ending “War on Terror”…
Thanks for exposing this latest lie. The oligarchy’s control is built on lies. It’s very important the public see they are being lied to, and by whom.
In many ways HAMAS is worse than ISIS
RE: “Another Netanyahu lie exposed: Hamas is not ISIS”
MY COMMENT: Someone’s been outed, and it’s not Yitzhak Shamir!
SEE: “A Boy Called Bibi ~ Netanyahu on the Couch” | by Uri Avnery | CounterPunch.org | May 1-3, 2015
ENTIRE COMMENTARY – http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/01/netanyahu-on-the-couch/
One wonders if IS is ISrael.