Propaganda in Local Newspapers: Distorting Reality and History
Today’s post will be a bit different. While I am primarily hoping to gear this substack around an analysis of ideology, I am posting instead my unedited response to a sickening local newspaper editorial. The piece in my local paper referred to Hamas as a “revolutionary group,” denied their well-documented use of human shields, denied that Israel could know if underground tunnels exist and where underground tunnels are located, and tried to justify the October 7th massacres and violence as somehow acceptable due to a distorted reading of history. I have cut my official response, to be submitted to my local newspaper, way down from the version I am posting here. I am only posting my longer version here due to recognizing just how prominent is the narrative that my local paper published and the need to have more content that rebuts such propaganda.
It is a good reminder that Jews are a small population of only 17 million worldwide, with the majority living in Israel, while the global Muslim population is about 2 billion. While hopefully it is clear that not all Muslim individuals will hold the same set of beliefs regarding Israel and Palestine, it is clear that Jews - despite our longstanding stereotype of being all-powerful and controlling the media - only have so much of a voice, one that is easily drowned out when the axis of China-Russia-Iran-Qatar overtakes social media algorithms and university funding, and the majority sentiment of people from authoritarian, rabidly antisemitic governments with state-run medias are amplified and uncritically normalized. I think myself and many others are wondering how our voices can be heard over the cacophony of a zealous and hateful majority. So with that, I tried my best to write some sort of slightly more historically and factually-grounded response to the sentiment expressed in my local paper. My response still did not nearly touch the depth of the historical innacuracies in my local newspaper, but hopefully, having some sort of long-form rebuttal out on the internet can help amplify a more truthful narrative, a narrative besmeared as all-powerful while, in actuality, struggling as a frequently silenced minority.
My Rebuttal
In light of an article in the Canyon Chronicle that called Hamas a “revolutionary group,” I would like to clear up dangerous misconceptions on the terrorist organization of Hamas, and how they are as much, if not more so, of a threat to the Palestinian people as they are to Jews and all those who might be in Israel. Hamas does not want peace. Hamas does not want a two-state solution. They do not even want a peaceful one-state solution. Hamas is a religious extremist organization whose sole mission is the destruction of Israel and the mass killing of Jews, regardless of what that means for the Palestinians trapped under their rule. Any Palestinian who disagrees with Hamas leadership and ideology is subject to torture or execution.
Hamas’ Charter and their Follow-Through
The following are quotes from the Hamas Charter, known formally as the Hamas Covenant: The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, first published in 1988 and available to read in full from the Yale Law School website. The Charter is the equivalent of the Hamas Constitution, their founding documents and guiding principles.
“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.”- Article Seven
“…Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” - Article Eight
“Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” - Article 13
“They (the Jews) were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution… With their money they formed secret societies…They were behind World War I…They were behind World War II…” - Article Twenty-Two
“Their plan is embodied in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” - Article Thirty-Two
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas terrorists broke into Israel and set out to make good on their promises. That morning, Hamas began their massacre at a music festival full of teenagers and young adults, murdered over 300 attendees, and committed mass rape. As one survivor reported to the police department as seeing happen to her friend, “They bent her over and I realized they were raping her and simply passing her on to the next.” She continued to recount that her friend was then murdered by being “shot her in the head while he was raping her, didn’t even lift his pants.” Another survivor speaking to PBS recounted, “The terrorists raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them…(then) they laughed. They always laughed. It's — I can't forget how they laughed in this situation.”
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a professor at University of Pennsylvania Law School, who joined as a human rights scholar regarding gender-based violence, put together a presentation for students of various Harvard graduate schools, a presentation replete with difficult topics and even more difficult images. One can watch her presentation and the difficult images on Youtube. Images of naked dead girls with their legs spread eagle in rigor mortis. Videos of naked women with broken limbs being paraded on the back of pickup trucks while crowds on the streets of Gaza grope and beat their bodies. Some of these women, or at least those who were not killed, Dr. Elkayam-Levy explains, are now held as hostages, most likely still subject to repeated rape, some suffering injuries that can lead to death, some maybe pregnant from the Hamas assault against them.
Hamas likewise killed and tortured thousands, often targeting the elderly, mothers, and babies. Hamas murdered babies in their cribs. Hamas burned down houses indiscriminately, slaughtering entire families. CNN reported that responders to the scenes of carnage found a Hamas booklet on how to kidnap and torture Israelis. “And first thing what do you do when you find the citizens, you torture them. This is the booklet, it says exactly how to torture them, how to abduct them, how to kidnap them,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog explained to CNN.
Hamas then kidnapped 240 people, hostages to use to demand the release of convicted Hamas terrorists from Israeli prisons. Hamas kidnapped babies, toddlers, children, whole families, and the elderly. Some of these hostages have been released in exchange for prisoners who have helped carry out attacks for this brutal regime. Many have not yet been released. Hostages have now been held for around two months.
One woman who Hamas kidnapped was 9 months pregnant, and is believed now to have given birth while in Hamas captivity. One cannot imagine what this woman or her newborn are enduring. We do not know if she has survived or if her baby has survived, and what pain she endured along the way.
Hamas kidnapped multiple children, often after having killed their parents in front of their eyes, such as with Abigail More Eden. Abigail was then a 3-year old American girl whose parents were murdered in front of her before she was taken hostage. As reported by NBC News, Abigail, “was in her father’s arms when a Hamas gunman shot him and he fell on top of her.” Abigail then, “crawled out from under her father’s body … full of his blood,” before she herself was captured as a hostage. Both of her parents are now dead.
The youngest child taken hostage is a boy named Kfir Bibas, only 9-months old when kidnapped by Hamas, along with his 4 year old brother and his mother.
One child, 12-year old Eitan Yahalomi, who was recently released, was forced to watch video footage of the Hamas October 7th atrocities on repeat, and was threatened with rifles if he cried. He was beaten repeatedly.
Another child who was recently released, nine-year old Emily Hand, still speaks in a whisper, being traumatized from two months of being told she could not make any noise.
Hamas: a Short History
Now, some people might make a “noble savage” type argument, saying that Hamas only acts as they do due to the oppression that they and their people have suffered at the hands of Israelis. This is flawed for at least two reason. One: Hamas has specifically rejected the chance for autonomy and peace in order to try to make good on their explicit constitutional aims of destroying the state of Israel. Two: Hamas is just as brutal against their own people as they are against Israelis.
Something that many in these current protests tend to leave out is that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. Yes, Israeli unilaterally disengaged from Gaza, removing their military presence, and evicting their settlers, often dramatically, in order to give Gaza political autonomy. To understand Israel’s 2005 decision, and why Hamas sabotaged it by using the Israeli withdrawal to attack Israel rather than to establish statehood, one can look back to 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords.
In 1993, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat, achieved something at the Oslo Accords one never thought would be possible: Palestinian recognition of the right for Israel to exist. This came after years of surrounding regions trying to keep the War of 1948 alive vis a via using Palestinian people and their governance as pawns against Israel, and building up increasing radicalization in Gaza and the West Bank as a result. The Oslo Accords came after the violence of the First Intifada, during which time the PLO was still the primary leadership for Palestinians. However, the Oslo Accords angered Hamas, who as we see above, is a fanatical religious organization not interested in peace or statehood, but who believes they have a religious duty to destroy the state of Israel, and Hamas began to have increasing influence over the PLO. According to Mosab Hassan Yousef, the eldest son of one of Hamas’ seven founders - Sheikh Hasan Yousef - Arafat let the power of being perceived as the “Che Guevara” of Palestinians get to his head.
After the Oslo Accords, in 2000, Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak offered to Arafat the entirety of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and 90% of the West Bank in order for Arafat to establish an independent Palestinian state - the longed for “two-state solution.” But Arafat said no. He rejected the offer for Palestinian statehood. After becoming closer with the leaders of the Hamas movement, he began taking the Hamas talking points that the only solution he would accept would be a complete Palestinian “right to return,” which would essentially mean the end of Israel. Arafat knew this offer would be rejected, but according to those such as Yousef who worked with Arafat, Arafat did so purposefully, relishing in the respect that his stance brought him from the upper crust of religious extremists and various princes in the Middle East, while somehow still accruing sympathy from a Western media less concerned with history and the welfare of the Palestinian people than it was with the optics.
Nevertheless, Israel did not give up, and in 2005, tried again to give Palestinians autonomy in hopes for peace, as Israel’s past efforts for peace in the region had proven fruitful in very small bursts. In 1979 at the Camp David Accords, Egypt recognized Israel’s right to exist and the two nations signed a peace treaty. Until that point, Egypt had been a major force behind the PLO, as the PLO was founded in the 1960s by Gamal Abdul Nasser, the president of Egypt, as a way to use Palestinian governance as a proxy for Egyptian interests. Egypt then recognizing Israel’s right to exist angered many in Palestine who had been essentially used by Egypt for years, hence Hamas referring to Egypt by name and the “treacherous Camp David Accord” in their charter. In 1994, a year after the Oslo Accords, Jordan recognized Israel’s right to exist.
Thus, in 2005, in a gesture of goodwill, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed the he would unilaterally disengage from Gaza - he withdrew all military personnel, evicted all settlers, and left behind millions of dollars in agricultural technology to aid the Gazan agricultural sector. The hope was that Gaza would be able to establish a functioning government via holding elections, and become an independent state,. Unfortunately, that did not happen. After the Gazan elections, Hamas took power, and used their newfound political autonomy to do as Arafat did before them: once again, exploit the Palestinian people for personal interests. Hamas immediately sabotaged the autonomy that Gaza was granted and embarked on their clearly stated goal: trying to destroy Israel. Thus in 2007, after an onslaught of rocket attacks, Hamas-designated enemies Egypt and Israel jointly agreed to uphold a blockade against Gaza, trying to prevent further weapons from entering the country or further attacks from being carried out.
Hamas and their Own People
Some might still make excuses for Hamas. But then, what of Hamas’ treatment of their own people?
Mosab Hassan Yousef, as mentioned before, is the eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the seven founders of Hamas, and was considered the Hamas “heir apparent” as the eldest son of his much beloved father. It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that Mosab has not inherited the throne of Hamas - which would have been tempting, considering that today, the current top leaders of Hamas own several billions of dollars in personal wealth while living in luxury apartments in Qatar and flying in private jets. It might be even more of a surprise to know that Mosab was so horrified with the brutality of Hamas against both the Palestinian people and Israelis that he joined the Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, to help Israel eradicate Hamas.
In his heart-wrenching autobiography, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices, Mosab says that he was indoctrinated to wish death upon Jews and Israelis from birth. However, even in his childhood, the seeds were planted for him to eventually doubt the Hamas mission. For one, he tells stories of Hamas members whipping him with electrified wires while he was a child, supposedly to discipline him into behaving in a more serious manner as befitting his father’s status. Later, he recounts stories of his schooling during the period of the First Intifada. At this time, Hamas and the PLO were engaged in a power struggle, which got taken out on the Palestinian people. In Chapter 5, Mosab recounts how during the First Intifada, either the PLO or Hamas would call for business strikes, but often at different times. In Mosab’s words, “If Hamas called a strike and threatened to burn the stores of anyone who stayed open, PLO leaders across the street threatened to burn the stores of anyone who stayed closed.” There was no winning for the Palestinian people. You had to choose a side, and the other side would retaliate by destroying your livelihood.
But Mosab’s first major eye-opening event was after he purchased weapons with the intention of killing Israelis, and found himself in an Israeli prison. There, it was not the IDF who proved to be the villain, but fellow members of Hamas. Mosab recounts with horror - both in his book and as testified in front of the United Nations on November 20th, 2023 - that Hamas members formed their own internal “guards” who would torture other Hamas members, sometimes under suspicion of being a collaborator, but almost always either because that person was lower status or weaker in some way. Often, it was to satisfy some sick sexual desires of the Hamas “maj’d” guards. Mosab takes us through eye-opening events of hearing the screams of his fellow Palestinians as Hamas would stick nails under their fingernails, or melt plastics onto them, or other forms of inhumanity, oftentimes getting them to “confess” to ludicrous stories such as having sex with animals, which the maj’d would then distribute to that prisoner’s community back home so as to cause them to be social outcasts once released from prison.
Mosab, as an heir to his father, regularly attended top-level meetings with him. However, Mosab quickly grew disillusioned with the obvious corruption and self-interest of the so-called leaders and their willingness to use Palestinians to serve their own interests. As Mosab phrases it, “Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn’t about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society.” He then explains how after Arafat rejected Israeli PM Ehud Barak’s monumental offer to give Palestine nearly all of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, Arafat increduously rejected it, and Arafat and Mosab’s father began working together to orchestrate the Second Intifada. He explains, “there always seemed to be more to gain if Palestinians were bleeding. Another intifada would surely get the blood flowing and the Western news cameras rolling once again.”
Unfortunately, the reality behind Hamas’ brutality towards their own people is confirmed by multiple sources, going back to Hamas’ rise in power. On April 20th 2009, the Human Rights Watch published “Under Cover of War: Hamas Political Violence in Gaza,” about Hamas using Israel’s response to the Hamas attacks as an excuse to torture, punish, and execute political dissidents in Gaza. Student organizations, protests, any sort of speech doubting the vision of Hamas were met with torture, if not death. On May 26, 2015, the New York Times reported an uncannily similar article to that one published 6 years earlier: “Hamas is Accused of Using Gaza War as Cover to Torture and Kill Palestinians.” And so it goes. Projects such as Whispered in Gaza, hosted by the Center for Peace Communications, allows Gazan’s to speak out against Hamas and share their own stories under protection and anonymity.
Despite what the prior article published in the Chronicle said, Hamas’ usage of human shields is well documented, and a topic - one of many - that Mosab Hassan Yousef testified about before the United Nations. The truth of the matter is that Hamas has build their elaborate underground city of tunnels under United Nations-funded schools and hospitals, and Hamas tells their people not to evacuate when Israel seeks to destroy their weaponry, because the deaths of Palestinians help to erode “support for the Zionist cause.” In 2014, Amnesty International issued a report on how Hamas had turned al-Shifa hospital into their de-facto headquarters. This was known at least as early as 2009, when the New York Times similarly reported on the Hamas presence at al-Shifa. Furthermore, when the Israeli military targets a home that is being used to stockpile ammunition, they call and give warning to the residents to leave. But there is ample video footage of Hamas telling residents not to leave. In a Washington Post article entitled, “We Can’t Ignore that Hamas Uses Human Shields,” the author cites from CNN’s Jake Tapper as saying, “We can’t ignore the truth that Hamas uses human shields…We have video of Hamas…on television telling people to stay in their homes, that it’s an effective way to make sure to fight off Israelis.”
In Mosab Hassan Yousef’s recent testimony in front of the United Nations, one that I would urge all people to watch on the UN’s website, he begs for the international community to support Israel in their quest to eradicate Hamas. “I love my people,” he says, and for that reason, he wants to see the reign of Hamas brought to an end.
Palestinian Leadership as Puppets for Proxy Wars : First Egypt, now Iran
Furthermore, just as Egypt had set up the PLO in the 1960s to address Egyptian interests, Iran is backing Hamas to promote Iranian interests, and the recent Hamas terror attack on Israel was specifically planned by Iran, in part to provoke an Israeli response that would cement Iran as a world superpower. An article entitled, “Why Iran is Gambling on Hamas: Tehran’s Strategy to Weaken Israel and Divide the Region,” published in Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, helps to explain the Iranian backing of Hamas. Hamas is part of Iran’s “axis of resistance,” which includes, “Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and elsewhere.” According to the author, Iran views October 7thn as a success in bringing their proxy wars directly to Israel’s soil, and believes it can help coalesce other fighters for Iran in the region.
Foreign Affairs explains the group of Persian fighters who toppled the Shah and set up the Ayatollah in the 1970s trained with Palestinian fighters, then under Yasser Arafat. Once the Ayatollah was installed, they helped to continue training and arming Palestinian fighters. However, it was primarily after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 that Iran began to ramp up funding and providing arms to Hamas, sensing weakness in Israel and an opportunity to escalate conflict.
Iran planned this conflict alongside Hamas for several years, in part, to cement themselves as an alternative to Western superpowers, to foster outrage and then take a role as a “moral leader” amongst nations of the global south or in the Middle East. Furthermore, they launched this attack in time to destabilize Saudi Arabia normalizing relationships with Israel. In the language of the Hamas charter, too many nations were “leaving the circle of the struggle against Zionism,” which included Egypt, later Jordan, then the UAE after the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia normalizing relations was a step too far and would jeopardize Iran’s plans. Finally, Iran has been scapegoating Israel for years and planned this current conflict to help cover up their own internal repression. What better way to take eyes off of the recent round of women’s protests, imprisonment and executions around mandatory veiling in Iran than to turn to the classic scapegoat - the Jew - to try to bandy the people around a common enemy? Sadly, so far, it appears that Iran’s plan to generate outrage due to Israel’s response is working. And we should not allow that to happen.
Did Hamas Change their Charter in 2017? The Answer is No.
Still, some people try to argue that Hamas has “changed,” pointing to a document that they released in 2017 and claiming that it is Hamas’ new charter. “Hamas no longer hates Jews, now they are clear to delineate between the Israeli government and the Jewish faith,” is an actual comment I have read online. This, however, is false. Hamas released their 2017 document during the same week that President Trump was meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas’ only other chief political rival, as a way to try to insinuate that the PA does not have the sole monopoly on diplomacy. Furthermore, Daniel Aaron Miller, a Middle East negotiator and advisor to six different American presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, wrote his analysis of the 2017 Hamas document for the foreign affairs think-tank and consulting group, the Wilson Center. In it, he explains:
But the relatively compressed new manifesto—of 42 articles—was clearly not intended to formally supersede the 1988 founding charter.
Comparing the original charter and this new political document is difficult, mainly because they were intended to serve fundamentally different purposes. The founding charter had a strategic purpose to anchor and guide the organization during its early years. This new document is more a political statement; it has the air of a tactical adjustment. Indeed, even before the new document was released in Qatar, Deputy Gaza Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh said that it would undermine neither “our principles nor our strategy.”
Haniyeh is a top-leader of Hamas, and one of the main orchestrators behind October 7th, and has stated unequivocably that any political document released in 2017 changed nothing of their underlying beliefs or their tactics. Hamas is clearly not going to change anytime soon, and if anything, have already stated their desite to carry out many more October 7th-type attacks, despite what so much propaganda coming from our legacy instittuions will uncritically claim.
“Oppressor-Oppressed” is Not the Right Framework to Analyze this Conflict
What should Israel do? What will happen if the IDF succeeds in destroying Hamas’ underground city of tunnels? If anybody had an answer to this, they would surely have a Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately though, in recent years, it has become en vogue to collapse the complexity of the Palestinian, Arab, Iranian, and Israeli conflict into a simple “oppressor-oppressed” dynamic, a dynamic that simply does not map onto the current conflict. Worse, trying to force that ideological framework onto the Middle Eastern crisis is to essentially reiterate an age-old antisemitic trope: “Jews are foreigners who do not belong and ruin the purity of the land. They are agents of foreign governments and, paradoxically, control foreign governments. Jews are bloodthirsty, wealthy, and all-powerful, and thus we should remove them.” That is to say, if your solution to the Middle Eastern conflict is to say, “who cares about what happens to Israel?” Your “solution” sounds awfully like “the Final Solution.” If your protest to help Palestinians is only focused on Israel and is not protesting Hamas and demanding the immediate release of the hostages, if your protest does not demand the surrender of the brutal, fanatical Hamas regime, if your protest to help Palestinians does not condemn Iran and Qatar for funding Hamas and Hezbollah to the tune of billions of dollars in order to fight proxy wars, then your protest might be more about hating Israel than about helping Palestinians. And people who care more about hating Israel than helping Palestinians is precisely why Palestinians are living under the conditions that they are today.
Thank you for this well written, fact-filled article. Will it be published in our local paper? The misinformation published needs to be corrected for the Topanga community.
Thanks for showing in great detail how Hamas is the Gazan people's worst enemy, ultimately inflicting more pain and suffering under the guise of "liberation".