Or rather why do people care about Hamas at all? Their activities are contained in the Middle East, they aren't the West's problem, , they are mostly israel's problem and their main goal is to get Palestinian land back , so they are mostly Palestinian nationalists. Im not sure what is the problem with that exactly. The only people who should logically have a problem with hamas are israeli shills but even they should only really blame themselves because Netenyahu admitted that he helped to fund hamas.
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (127)
sorted by:
So I can actually break this down. Years ago I did a big study on the tech and tactics used by Islamic militants (and others) around the world as a research project, which led to learning basically everything else about them too.
The two most important ME militant groups are Hamas and Hezbollah. But to understand why Hamas is "hated" I'll compare and contrast the two.
Hezbollah: Functions and organized like a small, but professional army. Recruitment, uniforms, budget, access to modern weapons, and makes a reasonable effort to follow the international rules of warfare. They basically function like Lebanon's de-facto National Guard, working alongside and complimenting their existing army and usually following the orders of its government whern told to do or not to do something. Notably while they're quite active (and effective) in actually conducting operations against muh Israel, they do so like a professional army. When Israel attacked Lebanon back in 2006, Hez fucked them up pretty good, doing more damage than the actual Lebanese army did and forcing the Israelis to withdraw much earlier than they had planned. Because of this Israel hates their guts and is desperate to paint them with the same brush as Hamas so the world will help destroy them.
Hamas on the other hand: These guys are almost a mirror of the 1970s IRA. They're small, pretty unprofessional, and fight dirty. They don't function like a cohesive force but rather a loose network of cells made up of friends and relatives, and so the right hand often doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and there's no central authority who can truly control all of them beyond going on TV and asking them nicely. If your cell wants to fight clean against Israeli military targets but Ahkmed down the block's cell wants to go all out suicide bombing civilians, you're both still "Hamas" and you're both despised by most of the world because of Ahkmed. Hamas's political "organization" does everything from collecting the garbage off your street to delivering your mail (and ran for, and won, the election for government in Palestine), but other parts of it are out there shooting anti-tank missiles at school busses (literally happened) whether their government likes it or not, so the whole group gets written off as terrorists. Hamas also has the problem if being trapped in a walled off open-air prison, so most of their weapons are whatever shit they can cobble together out of whats lying around. Much gets made of their constant rocket attacks, but nobody ever mentions that they're using perfectly valid tactics suited to the World War 1-2 level of their tech. "Haifa is a military port? Shoot 10,000 rockets at its direction and hope one hits something important to their military." WW2 Russia would shed a tear of pride. Someone who wanted to could easily draw a distinction between the "legitimate" Hamas and the "evil" Hamas, but that doesn't serve anybody's political purposes so it never happens.