Hamas Violence: Not In My Name

By Ayman S. Ashour

After all the outrage, anger and threats, it’s time to take a breather and think things over. Hamas has chosen violence as its method of resisting Israeli occupation. This choice was not put to a vote by the majority of the Palestinian people; it was imposed on them. As Hamas’ blind violence was inflicted on Israeli innocent civilians, Sharon was only too happy to inflict back violence on the Palestinian nation ten-fold.

This vicious cycle has continued now for the past three years. Sharon and his band of thugs appear to anxiously await the next suicide terror launched by Hamas or other terrorist organization to proceed immediately to demolish homes, launch rocket attacks on neighborhoods, confiscate more land and create more Israeli “facts on the ground.”

The Palestinians as a nation learned that the biggest enemy of aggressive expansionist Zionism is peace. This took a long time to sink in, and in the process cost more and more refugees, endless suffering and great material loss. But the people of Palestine learned and voted for peaceful coexistence. The Sadat doctrine was finally accepted 15 years after his death. Israel thrives on war and conflict and can only be forced to corrective action through peaceful means.

Sheikh Yassin and Hamas rejected that doctrine and so do Likud and Sharon and the rest of the gang. For the last three years, we have all been witnessing an unholy alliance between the rejectionists of both sides. And so Sharon achieves his mission and gets re-elected, and gradually the desire for peace and acceptance of co-existence on the part of the Palestinians is replaced by the Hamas agenda of despair, violence and terror.

I reject Hamas’ violence, not because I am a pacifist—I am not. I reject it because it was not started with the support of the Palestinian people, it targets innocent people, it causes disproportional suffering on the Palestinians and not least it fails to produce any positive results. Jews in Israel, frightened by Hamas terrorism, vote against concessions to the Palestinians, elect the biggest bully to protect them and in the US and elsewhere work hard and give money to protect their tiny threatened state! So Hamas’ actions on democratic, moral and practical grounds should be opposed and condemned by those who seek justice for the Palestinians.

One of the worst possible results of Hamas actions is the similarity of their violence to that of the ultra zealots, the terrorists of Bin Laden. The Palestinian people have a legitimate cause and are suffering from a brutal colonial expansionist occupation, whereas Bin Laden’s zealots have no legitimacy of purpose and are only driven by hate of all that is different from them. Yet by using the same tools paints the Palestinians with the very same ugly brush of Bin Laden’s terror.

It has taken the Palestinians four decades to win much of the world over to their cause, but much of this good will is now being squandered as Hamas’ slaughter of Israelis looks like Madrid and 9/11. More and more people are learning to relate to Israeli suffering and in the process are being blinded, again, to the long and deep suffering of the Palestinian nation; a nation of refugees, a nation under occupation.

It is crucial that the latest Israeli war crime—the murder of Sheikh Yassin—does not produce a new wave of Palestinian terror. Palestinians and those who truly stand with them should speak up against any further Hamas violence. Say it loud, very loud: Not in my name, not in the name of Islam, not in the name of Palestine.