Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Muhammad Shehada - We Palestinians Condemned A Leader’s Anti-Semitism. Will It Matter?

There's me trying to do my best to defend the Palestinian cause online and on YouTube, and then Hamas leader, Fathi Hammad, comes out with his vile statements. Is he a Mossad asset, I wondered? He might as well be, but he's probably just incredibly stupid. 

Controversy and exaggeration are nothing new for Hammad. It’s earned him a poor reputation and he’s hated across the Gaza Strip and even inside Hamas itself.
But if his statements are not supported by average Gazans, they are always well received in another arena: anti-Palestinian propagandists. For example, when Hammad implored Arab neighbors to support Hamas, claiming that “half of Gaza is Egyptian and the other half is Saudi Arabian,” groups like the Middle East Media Research Institute translated and published his words, circulating them to delegitimize the national Palestinian struggle for statehood.
And though I haven’t seen a single Palestinian promoting or defending Hammad’s latest hateful statement, his poisonous performance was applauded on the other side of the fence. No less a persona than Netanyahu’s spokesman literally thanked Hammad for providing very valuable quotations that Netanyahu would use to “reveal Hamas’s true face.”

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