this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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This meme is from 2004. History repeats itself.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I addressed something similar to the first article you linked in another comment. The gist is that, no, that is not their official policy, and that contradicts with their official charter, posted on their official website.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes the article I linked above discusses the revised charter. I see why you chose to share it rather than the original.

Hamas' original charter of course was explicitly genocidal:

Released on August 18, 1988, the original covenant spells out clearly Hamas’s genocidal intentions. Accordingly, what happened in Israel on Saturday is completely in keeping with Hamas’s explicit aims and stated objectives. It was in fact the inchoate realization of Hamas’s true ambitions.
The most relevant of the document’s 36 articles can be summarized as falling within four main themes:

  1. The complete destruction of Israel as an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a theocratic state based on Islamic law (Sharia),
  2. The need for both unrestrained and unceasing holy war (jihad) to attain the above objective,
  3. The deliberate disdain for, and dismissal of, any negotiated resolution or political settlement of Jewish and Muslim claims to the Holy Land, and
  4. The reinforcement of historical anti-Semitic tropes and calumnies married to sinister conspiracy theories. ...

After some general explanatory language about Hamas’s religious foundation and noble intentions, the covenant comes to the Islamic Resistance Movement’s raison d’être: the slaughter of Jews. “The Day of Judgement will not come about,” it proclaims, “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.”

Regarding the new one, the one you linked:

A Kinder, Gentler Charter?
On May 1, 2017, Hamas issued a revised charter. Gone were the “vague religious rhetoric and outlandish utopian pronouncements” of the earlier document, according to analysis prepared for the Institute of Palestine Studies. Instead, the new charter was redolent of “straightforward and mostly pragmatic political language” that had “shifted the movement’s positions and policies further toward the spheres of pragmatism and nationalism as opposed to dogma and Islamism.” Nonetheless, the analyst was struck by “the movement’s adherence to its founding principles” alongside newly crafted, “carefully worded” language suggesting moderation and flexibility.
Israel immediately dismissed the group’s effort to promote a kinder, gentler image of its once avowedly bloodthirsty agenda. “Hamas is attempting to fool the world, but it will not succeed,” a spokesperson from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office predicted.
In fact, the new document differs little from its predecessor. Much like the original, the new document asserts Hamas’s long-standing goal of establishing a sovereign, Islamist Palestinian state that extends, according to Article 2, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and from the Lebanese border to the Israeli city of Eilat—in other words, through the entirety of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. And it is similarly unequivocal about “the right of return” of all Palestinian refugees displaced as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars (Article 12)—which is portrayed as “a natural right, both individual and collective,” divinely ordained and “inalienable.” That right, therefore “cannot be dispensed with by any party, whether Palestinian, Arab or international,” thus again rendering negotiations or efforts to achieve any kind of political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians irrelevant, void, or both. Article 27 forcefully reinforces this point: “There is no alternative to a fully sovereign Palestinian State on the entire national Palestinian soil, with Jerusalem as its capital.”
The most striking departure from the 1988 charter is that the 2017 statement of principles and objectives now claims that Hamas is not anti-Jewish but anti-Zionist and, accordingly, sees “Zionists” and not “Jews” as the preeminent enemy and target of its opprobrium. The revised document therefore modulates the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric of its predecessor but once again decries Zionism as central to a dark, conspiratorial plot of global dimensions.
For centuries, Jews have been blamed for causing the anti-Semitism directed against them. The new Hamas charter perpetuates this libel, arguing, “It is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity” and who are therefore responsible for the conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

It seems like Hamas revised some of the more objectionable language in the original, but they are still Hamas, and their intentions are quite clear both by word and deed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The comment I linked to you in response to a comment making the same claims you're making. All of your points should be addressed in the comment I linked. Is there any part of the comment I linked you that you think is incorrect? Or is there something you think I left unaddressed? Please let me know.

It seems like Hamas revised some of the more objectionable language in the original

It's a quite big change, not mere paraphrasing or slight changes if that's what you're implying. Hamas changed radically in that time, as I explained in the comment I linked, and the document reflects that.

but they are still Hamas, and their intentions are quite clear both by word and deed.

Intentions of what? Do you mean your original claim above? Again, I already talked about why that's false. It would be easier if you address my argument instead of make the same claims again. The only genocidal entity by word and deed at the moment is Israel.