By Anis Hamadeh
(Anis Hamadeh is in the Free Gaza Web and Media Team)
Palestine Chronicle
".....Hamas has a record of human rights violations, too, and the Free Gaza Movement is confronted with the question of how they can inherently support terrorists. In this logic, any support for the civil population in Gaza is pro-Hamas and pro-terrorist. How cruel to punish a whole people in that way. (And how would you react if you were accidentally born into this people?) Hamas was democratically elected and it was the so-called "democrats" themselves who treasoned democracy by not acknowledging the elected party. It is quite amazing that e.g. all the early Israeli prime ministers came from terror groups and no official ever bothered to demand boycotts and sieges except for the people from the region who were too weak to implement them on a major scale. Besides, the Gaza Strip is not sovereign, but illegaly controlled by another state: Israel. This has an effect on the Gaza Strip and it makes resistance legitimate. Not terror, certainly. Terror in the sense of harming civilians for political purposes is never legitimate, not even for states.
It is a mystery how the Free Gaza Movement can polarize to this extend by nonviolently demanding the human rights to be applied to humans. The reason probably is that the boats from Cyprus remind people of what has happened to this country over the last decades. Because when you have one of the most lethal and active armies in the world on the one hand and a native population without an army on the other, you can imagine who makes the decisions. But - when an army has to shy away because it cannot act in secret like in the Free Gaza case, then people realize that there is something even stronger than violence, and that is the public. "
(Anis Hamadeh is in the Free Gaza Web and Media Team)
Palestine Chronicle
".....Hamas has a record of human rights violations, too, and the Free Gaza Movement is confronted with the question of how they can inherently support terrorists. In this logic, any support for the civil population in Gaza is pro-Hamas and pro-terrorist. How cruel to punish a whole people in that way. (And how would you react if you were accidentally born into this people?) Hamas was democratically elected and it was the so-called "democrats" themselves who treasoned democracy by not acknowledging the elected party. It is quite amazing that e.g. all the early Israeli prime ministers came from terror groups and no official ever bothered to demand boycotts and sieges except for the people from the region who were too weak to implement them on a major scale. Besides, the Gaza Strip is not sovereign, but illegaly controlled by another state: Israel. This has an effect on the Gaza Strip and it makes resistance legitimate. Not terror, certainly. Terror in the sense of harming civilians for political purposes is never legitimate, not even for states.
It is a mystery how the Free Gaza Movement can polarize to this extend by nonviolently demanding the human rights to be applied to humans. The reason probably is that the boats from Cyprus remind people of what has happened to this country over the last decades. Because when you have one of the most lethal and active armies in the world on the one hand and a native population without an army on the other, you can imagine who makes the decisions. But - when an army has to shy away because it cannot act in secret like in the Free Gaza case, then people realize that there is something even stronger than violence, and that is the public. "
No comments:
Post a Comment