Hamas/ISIS: The Blind & The Unblinkered

From the lefty Frontline Club's website: http://www.frontlineclub.com/first-wednesday-16/

We are informed by BBC Watch:

'On September 3rd the Frontline Club – with which the BBC frequently collaborates – will be hosting an event titled “Reporting the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict – Emotion, Bias and Objectivity” which we are informed is already fully booked.

The topic of discussion is promoted as follows:

“The latest chapter in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has again highlighted the difficulties of covering this complex and deep-rooted conflict that provokes such a strong emotional response from the general public.

The BBC has faced accusation that it is not critical enough of Israel’s actions and that its reporting is one-sided, whereas Channel 4 News has been accused of crossing the line between journalism and campaigning. Is there a middle ground?

In the face of such devastation should we expect correspondents to offer an objective view devoid of emotion? If we encourage correspondents to show more emotion do we risk compromising the credibility and standard of journalism in this country?

Join us as we take a view of the coverage we have seen, talk to the journalists that have produced it and ask what we can learn.”

On the panel selected to provide answers to those questions are Jeremy ‘I see no human shields’ Bowen and Channel 4’s Jon Snow.

 The discussion would doubtless be enhanced were Bowen  (along with his colleague Orla Guerin) to take the trouble to brush up beforehand on the topic of Hamas’ use of human shields and that policy’s role in causing so many of the civilian casualties which he graphically reported during his recent stint in the Gaza strip....' 

But it is not only regarding the existence of human shields in Gaza that the BBC has turned a blind eye.  Beeboids (as the BiasedBBC website has long termed the Corporation's employees) have also chosen to ignore Hamas's similarities to Isis.

The incorrigibly biased Jon Donnison (pictured) might well practise an Orla Guerin-like scowl. For Al Beeb's erstwhile correspondent in Gaza, who's now their man in Australia but who was flown back to his old stomping ground during the present crisis, where he proved just as one-sided as before, has received many a thoroughly deserved, humiliating thrashing from BBCWatch's Hadar Sela.

That highly intelligent Israeli,with her thorough grounding in Israeli history and affairs, her sound knowledge of regional geopolitics, her gift for the written world, and her astuteness, has shown up Donnison's mediocrity, ignorance, and prejudice many times.

See, for example, here and here and here and here

And, not unnaturally, Donnison doesn't like the besting one bit: witness the recent spiteful trying-to-put-a-brave-face-on-things sour grapes tweet below:

Not that being shown up prevents Donnison from persisting in his offences against the BBC Charter and producers' guidelines or motivates his employer to rein him in.  Nor did his egregious bias prevent him from winning a Radio Academy Silver Sony Award for radio journalism of the year for his coverage of the 2012 Gaza/Israel War.

His bias is so overt and so pervasive that it is hardly surprising that some Israel supporters wonder whether this former reporter for BBC Radio Sheffield, who studied French and politics at the University of Edinburgh, was once a member of or influenced in some way by a Palestine Solidarity Campaign branch. 

And like the BBC's biased Jerusalem Bureau chief Paul Danaher, Donnison, who does nothing to conceal his disdain for the Israeli prime minister, on Twitter has pooh-pooed Netanyahu's analogy between Hamas and Isis, and mocked aspects of Netanyahu's postings.  Here's a taste:

Here's a man who could teach Danahar and Donnison much, the exiled Jordanian Palestinian leader Mudar Zahran, who's been visiting Bethlehem at some risk to himself.

This brave pro-Israel figure (if you're on Facebook and/or Twitter please consider following him, for he deserves a wide audience) is a practising Muslim who pulls no punches in condemning the evil that Islamic extremists do.

Moreover, CiF Watch, who reponded to this insolent peevish tweet by Donnison

by pointing out that the true disrespect is Donnison's anti-Israel bias, has many graphic examples that validate the Hamas/ISIS analogy:

Novelist Noah Beck shows that  

'Hamas and ISIS are birds of a feather, but the Western political class and media have very different approaches to them. Here, Hamas offers some friendly advice to ISIS on how to wrap the West around their little finger'

which is a follow-up to his previous piece here

As  distinguished American political scientist Michael Curtis has written:

'The clue to the intentions of Hamas is given in the Hamas Charter of 1988, a mixture of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel. Using the Avalon Project translation of the Charter or Covenant, one can discern the stated objectives of Hamas. Only a few selections, sometimes in oblique language, are necessary to understand this.

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, "There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him."

The Hamas Charter gives an answer to all the well-meaning groups and individuals who call for a peace conference. It declares that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. Rejecting calls for an international conference to solve the “Palestinian” question, it declares that there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.

Initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are all a waste of time and are vain endeavors.

The mass media will perhaps be surprised to learn from the Charter that Jews have taken control of the world media, news agencies, publishing houses, and broadcasting stations. Objective historians may be surprised that Jews have stirred revolutions in various parts of the world and were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and most others. All this for “sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”

The Charter informs us of future developments. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. The Islamic Resistance Movement must prevent this, and to leave the “circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason.”

The question arises: can members of Hamas, who believe that the “Jews are behind each and every catastrophe on the face of the earth,” be genuinely interested in any possible reconciliation with Israel when destruction of the Jewish state is at the core of their concern?'

 Nevertheless, despite the equally bloodthirsty approach of both Hamas and Isis, their priorities, according to this article by Iranian Ali Mamouri, differ with regard to the Zionist Entity:

 ....'Salafists believe that jihad must be performed under legitimate leadership.... Given that there is neither a legitimate leader nor a Salafist-approved declaration of jihad in Palestine, fighting there is forbidden.

In addition, for Salafists, if non-Muslims control Islamic countries and apostates exist in the Islamic world, the Islamic world must be cleansed of them before all else. In short, the purification of Islamic society takes priority over combat against non-Islamic societies. On this basis, Salafists see conflict with an allegedly illegitimate Hamas government as a first step toward confrontation with Israel. Should the opportunity for military action present itself in the Palestinian territories, Salafists would fight Hamas and other factions deemed in need of “cleansing” from the land and engage Israel afterward....

Salafists today see that their priority as fighting Shiites, “munafiqin” (dissemblers, or false Muslims) and apostates, whom they call the “close enemy.” During the current war in Gaza, a number of IS fighters have burned the Palestinian flag because they consider it a symbol of the decline of the Islamic world, which succumbed to national divisions through the creation of independent political states. In Salafist doctrine, the entire Islamic world must be united under a single state, an Islamic caliphate, which IS declared in late June.

Salafist groups active in Gaza have engaged in various rivalries with Hamas there, but they have not succeeded in establishing a foothold of any significance. Some groups have posted video clips acknowledging their support for IS following the group’s recent victories in Iraq and Syria. The main dispute between Hamas and Salafist groups rests on their disparate principles. Hamas is more realistic and pragmatic than the jihadist Salafists. The former has political priorities in liberating Palestinian land, whereas the latter has religious priorities in the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic caliphate and considers the Israeli issue secondary to this central goal.'

 But to quote from another fine piece by Michael Curtis:

'....Along with the Muslim Brotherhood, [ISIS and Hamas] are Islamic extremist groups, violent in their ruthless pursuit of objectives – ISIS to create a caliphate empire, and Hamas to eliminate the State of Israel.

The brutality of ISIS, now transformed into an Islamic state with a caliph, is apparent after its conquest of about a third of Syria, including the oil-rich eastern part, and much of north and central Iraq. Its ruthlessness and brutality are well-documented. That ruthlessness includes making decapitation an art form, executing dozens of Iraqi security forces, and cutting heads of Syrians.

It has imposed sharia law, banned music, separated boys and girls in school, and forced women to wear the niqab, or full veil....

Though the Obama administration has not proposed this, the present conflict provides the opportunity for the existing semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, set up in 2005, to be transformed into a Kurdish state, long overdue since promised by Britain and France in 1920.

 If the Western democracies appeared for too long to be unaware of the scale of the danger of Islamist ISIS, many, especially those in the mainstream media and the churches, seem equally oblivious to the real nature and danger of Hamas.  

They have not accepted that the real contemporary struggle is between an extreme and regressive Islamist group, linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and interested in the killing of Jews and the creation of a caliphate state, and the existence and survival of democratic Israel....

There is now little doubt that much of the hostility against Israel has been transformed into prejudicial anti-Semitism. The level of violence and the number of attacks on individual Jews and Jewish institutions, synagogues, school, stores, Holocaust memorials, and cultural events has made those institutions resemble armed fortresses. A crowd mentality of hatred has made decent individuals afraid to speak out....

Western public opinion, the media, and the academic world should recognize the existing struggle between an Islamist threat that would end the tolerance and civil liberties in the societies its forces might control, and democratic countries, with all their faults and problems, trying to resist that threat.

The choice should not be difficult, even for the New York Times.  It certainly should not be suicide. '

 Read the entire article here

 As for Aussie Muslims who support ISIS, and the attitude to such goings-on by certain leftists, read Andrew Bolt here