 | By mattpryor
October 4, 2010 | Share |
A bit of background for those who don't know - Mosab Hassan Yousef was the son of one of the founders of Hamas and worked as an undercover operative for Shin Bet for many years. He converted to Christianity and eventually got out of the region, wrote a book documenting his experiences called Son of Hamas - highly recommended reading. He also maintains a blog which gives a unique and fascinating perspective into the situation in Gaza and the conflict. He recently applied for, and was granted, political asylum in the US.
This is the first part of his latest blog, entitled "The furious insignificance of Hamas", which I hope he won't mind me reproducing here:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
These words, written four centuries ago, describe Hamas and life in the Gaza Strip today.
People hear news from the Middle East, and they ask me, "Mosab, what is Hamas doing? Where are they going?" And I tell them that Hamas is doing nothing and going nowhere, because Hamas, for all its zealots and college graduates, is ignorant.
This doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. But the most dangerous thing about Hamas is that it doesn’t know. It doesn’t know it’s going nowhere. It doesn’t know how to build anything more than a little clinic with only one doctor and insufficient medicine, which only gives it a humanitarian face, concealing its true identity.
It doesn’t know how to govern itself, much less a nation. It’s not that its members are uneducated; they’re just ignorant. They have no wisdom or common sense. They are unteachable, unreachable and unimpeachable, because their mind is made up and they will hear nothing except what comes out of their own mouths. Hamas believes it is right and the rest of the world is wrong. That it is righteous and everybody else is bad, because Allah said so.
When I was in the Israeli prison at Megiddo, Hamas behaved like a mini-regime, controlled by thugs and tyrants. The maj’d, its security wing, tortured men until they made up anything, denounced anyone to make the pain stop. And the maj’d were so stupid that they believed the confessions. I read those confessions. They were ridiculous, and virtually all of them were eventually disproved. I remember wondering what it would be like if Hamas ever gained control of the government in Palestine.
I don’t wonder anymore.
Nearly five years ago, they won the elections. When the international community refused to recognize the legitimacy of their victory, a furious Hamas soaked the streets with Fatah blood.
And what have they done with Gaza since then? Nothing. They have built no infrastructure and formed no government departments. They have not advanced Palestinian culture or improved Palestinian society. Prime Minister Ismail Haniya was responsible for the maj’d in prison, and he rules Gaza the same way today.
Everyone is gagged and crippled by fear. For my people in Gaza, Hamas police are like Hitler’s Wafen-SS, Mao’s Red Guard, the Kremlin’s KGB or Ceaucescu’s Securitate. Anyone can be kidnapped and tortured into confessing that they are collaborating with Israel.
In a recent news conference, Abu Abdallah Lafi, a Hamas internal security official, said, "we have arrested many," including women, who he called "a real danger to the unity of the people and their resistance" against Israel. Hamas spokesman Ehab Al-Ghsain boasted that his people had obtained "serious confessions and uncovered many collaborators who stood behind assassinations of some leaders of resistance and implemented policies of the enemy’s intelligence service against our people."
I promise you that all of these “serious confessions" were obtained by unrestricted torture. And the "collaborators" have absolutely nothing to do with the Shin Bet.
Al-Ghsain told reporters that these collaborators planted bombs at training camps and government offices and helped to coordinate IDF raids and assassinations. But I know from 10 years working in the highest levels of the Shin Bet that this is not how Israeli intelligence operates.
Hamas knows nothing of Israel. It does not know how to govern. It does not know how to create or build. It understands nothing about human rights. It knows only how to destroy. Hamas is a colony of hornets in a sack. And Gaza is the sack.
"Nothing is more terrible," said German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "than ignorance in action."
…
mattpryor
4 October, 2010 - 10:55
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Here's part two:
The furious insignificance of Hamas – Part II
In addition to governing by kidnapping and torture, Hamas controls hundreds of tunnels that admit goods through Egypt into Gaza. Hamas gives the best to its own and sells the rest at black market prices to Palestinian families, half of whom are unemployed. It steals international medical aid and sells it in its own pharmacies. Hamas even bulldozed the homes of nearly 200 families and stole their land to build an Islamic religious center, similar to the proposed 9/11 mosque in New York City.
Last year, the UN was forced to stop all aid to Gaza because Hamas stole blankets and food meant for my people. This summer, Hamas broke into the offices of nongovernment charities, including United Nations partner organizations, and shut them down, cutting off resources to 80 percent of Gaza’s residents.
When Hamas campaigned in 2005, one of its two planks was to clean up PA corruption, especially the gangster rule of Fatah strongman Mohammad Dahlan. But Hamas is just as corrupt as the PLO was under Yasser Arafat and his cronies and the PA is today under Mahmoud Abbas.
During an interview with a Middle Eastern journalist, Abu Mohammed, a secular businessman with close family ties to the old Fatah security services, said, “After the takeover, people thought it might get better if the religious guys were in charge of the money, that security would improve and corruption would end. But they’re just as corrupt. If you’re not in Hamas, you get nothing. If anyone does anything, they are arrested, tortured or killed. Just like with the Israelis. Except the Jews always give you a lawyer.”
Yet, in an interview September 27 with CNN’s Nic Robertson in Damascus, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal shamelessly told the world that, “Hamas’ strategy relies on reaching a way of determining our own destiny, taking back our land, defending our people against the occupation and the settlements and then working on establishing a true Palestinian state that will have true sovereignty.”
Is this how you defend your people? By destroying their homes to build your mosques? By stealing their international aid to line your pockets? By kidnapping and torture and forcing your religion on them? Is how you allow them to determine their own destiny?
When Meshaal is not blaming Israel for everything bad in Gaza, he blames the international community who he accused of “stand[ing] in silence and do[ing] nothing while the Palestinian people suffer, while they get killed, and they get oppressed.”
The Israelis have a word for that. It’s called chutzpah!
Hamas doesn't get it. It cannot see what lies ahead if it continues along its present course.
For 14 centuries, the Arab world has been a major contributor to the world in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, architecture, horticulture, philosophy, art, music, literature. But Hamas, now that it has its opportunity to show the world how it can govern, is using Islamic sharia law to crush the life, soul and creativity out of the people who gave it their trust.
Women are forbidden to ride on motorcycles with men. Male hairdressers are not allowed to work in women’s salons. “Modesty patrols” check cars for men riding with unrelated single women. A female Palestinian journalist was arrested at the beach for laughing in public and not wearing a head covering. Female lawyers are banned from courtrooms, unless they wear a hijab. Hamas has shut down Internet cafes, movie theaters and bars where young people hang out, as well as a hotel and restaurant whose owners refused to enforce the new law against women smoking nagilas (water pipes).
One reporter from Abu Dhabi wrote that people in Gaza “seem to be losing any sense of hope and increasingly, according to social workers, smugglers and even the police, turning in massive numbers to cheap narcotic tablets smuggled through tunnels from Egypt. A sense of lethargy and hopelessness now pervades almost every aspect of life here.”
If a government oppresses its people, if it makes a big deal out of petty things like this, how can it work together with the community to resolve bigger issues of health, education and the future of the Palestinian people?
Hamas has become the Taliban of Gaza. Since its emergence in 1994, the Taliban battled Afghan warlords and the Afghan government to gain power. But when it finally attained its objective, it was unable to build any society. Its culture was non-culture. Its modus operandi was to oppress and destroy. Its GNP was drugs and terrorism.
Even under the best conditions, Gaza will remain a hot spot on the Mediterranean, like Somalia in the Horn of Africa. Sunni Islam filled the void created by the revolutions and counter-revolutions that plagued Somalia since the early 1990s. Last year, the Somali parliament approved sharia law nationwide. As a result, the Islamists will control the country beyond the foreseeable future. And they too will produce only fear, hatred and destruction.