Hamas, Islamic State and the nature of terrorism

By Naftali Bennett

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Transcribed from the clipping

On the surface, Israel’s ongoing conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip appears to have nothing to do with other events taking place right now in the Middle East. The world tells us that we have a unique conflict with the Palestinian terror organization.

Hamas, we are told, simply wants freedom — a lifting of the blockade over Gaza, the opening of all crossings and regular money transfers for salaries. In reality, we are told, Hamas is a political organization, one that we should sit down with and negotiate a peaceful resolution.

Not far from Gaza though — in Syria and Iraq — another conflict is taking place, although in this case there are no doubts as to what needs to be done. Leaders from across the free world are united in their decision that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, needs to be crushed and destroyed.

No one has recommended a cease-fire — we’ve already tried 11 which Hamas has violated as of Friday — and no one recommends meeting ISIS leaders in a third country for negotiations (we’ve spent the past two weeks trying to negotiate with Hamas via Egyptian mediators in Cairo). When it comes to ISIS, war is war, evil is evil and ISIS needs to be eliminated.

The situation is black and white. What the free world fails unfortunately to understand is that Israel’s conflict with Hamas and the current battle to stop ISIS’ advances in Syria and Iraq are one and the same. Both Hamas and ISIS are radical Islamic organizations. ISIS wants to establish a caliphate throughout the world.

Hamas wants to do the same in Israel while openly calling and actively working for the destruction of our state along the way. Its charter makes no secret of this. These are organizations motivated by religion, not by nationalistic aspirations, and they do not hesitate to use extreme violence to advance and achieve their goals.

While ISIS beheads journalists and adversaries, Hamas kidnaps and slaughters teenage yeshiva students. While ISIS targets minority groups in Iraq, Gaza’s Christian community has mostly disappeared after being persecuted and targeted by Hamas Islamist thugs.

Members of Fatah — Hamas’ rivals — have long been ousted from Gaza, some thrown from the rooftops of buildings just to get a point across.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping.

Context added by this archive

The one clipping in batch B where Bennett writes the copy himself in a major American daily, and it is the harshest page in the batch. The paper supplied the illustration: a Reuters photograph of a Palestinian about to be executed by Hamas, captioned flatly.

This record answers the question of whether American papers softened Bennett - here the Tribune did not mediate him at all; it handed him the page and the pictures.

Nouns on this page: 'the Palestinian terror organization', 'Hamas Islamist thugs', 'radical Islamic organizations'. 'Occupied' does not appear. 'Palestinian' appears as an adjective attached to terrorism, and once, in the caption, as a man about to be killed.

Cite this clipping

"Hamas, Islamic State and the nature of terrorism," Chicago Tribune, 25 August 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-052. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-052