I want to roll my eyes every time I see somebody take this stance, not simply because it is tiresome and it takes no courage to say, but mostly because it ignores the context. Every time. It not only overlooks how and why neocolonialism lead to Hamas, it overlooks why Hamas would resort to crude tactics like taking hostages (as if the Zionist régime was always open to dialogue), it overlooks why a substantial percentage of Palestinian adults support Hamas, it overlooks the decades of atrocities that Zionist authorities have been committing against the Palestinians since day one, and most of all, it overlooks the overwhelming amount of power that the Zionist ruling class has in this situation.
My response: fine, you don’t have to like Hamas, but to focus on condemning it repeatedly is to lose sight of the very conditions and the ruling class that gave rise to Hamas in the first place; it’s a bland inaction that gets us nowhere. If you say ‘Hamas is the real problem’ or ‘Hamas is just as bad as the IDF’ then I’m afraid that you have missed the point completely.
I have an imagined response, I don’t know if it is intelligible though…
Blaming Palestinians for October 7 is like blaming Afghans for the 9/11 attack. 9/11 was a response by one unaffiliated with Afghanistan to decades of violent military interference to multiple sovereign nations’ agency and, compared to the actions of the US Government, the response was hardly measurable on the same scale of “terror”.
9/11 was orchestrated by Wahhabist Saudis with the knowledge of the CIA so that the US could invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Investigative Journalist Kit Klarenberg proved that the perpetratorshad relationship to CIA.
Hamas is a people’s movement, not Wahhabist, and literally decolonized their territory by expelling occupiers.
It’s a harmful comparison that reflects the larger community of leftist ignorance about the history of imperialism in West Asia and the Islamic Resistance.
Ooof
so if I’m understanding the correctly the point you’re making, the article you linked, and the smidgen I read of the nature of nature of Wahhabism, I’m comparing two events that are similar only in that they involved humans.
One was a strategic response by those involved in a conflict, the other was astroturfed theater.
Yes that is accurate.