New translation of Hamas charter contains anti-semitism

November 24 2007
By Ulrich W. Sahm, Jerusalem

"The Prophet - Peace be upon him - declared: "Time will not begin until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, not before the Jews do not hide themselves behind rocks and trees, who then proclaim: Oh Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me; come and kill him!"

The language in the Hadith of El-Buchari, the traditional religious literature of Islam, is not the only anti-semitic element in the 1988 Charter of Hamas, the programme of the dominant political party in the Palestinian Parliament.

"The Islamic resistance movement gets its directions from Islam: The doctrine of Islam is the foundation for thinking, understanding and ideas of existence, life and mankind", says Article 1 of the Charter. The religious arguments leaves no room for a Jewish state in the Middle East. The final goal of Hamas is that the flag of Allah will fly over every inch of Palestine". Furthermore: "There is no other solution to the Palestinian problem than Jihad (Holy war). The initiatives, proposals and international conferences is nothing but a waste of time, a lunatic undertaking."

According to investigations by Israeli daily "The Jerusalem Post" representatives of Hamas in Beirut, Damascus and London intend to rewrite the charter.

Hebron-born Dr, Azzam Tamimi, 51, Director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thinking, told the newspaper in at telephone interview: " All the madness from the Protocols of Elders of Zion and the conspiracy theory must be eradicated. It should never have been there in the first place".

This party platform of the Hamas announces that the Jews all over the world have accumulated tremendous wealth and have taken control over the media. They provoked the French Revolution and are to blame for communism. The Jews, in the text called "The Enemy", ignited the first and the second world war in order to enrich themselves by the arms industry

It is noticeable that every article of the charter is accompanied with quotations from the Qur'an. In that way one gets the impression that the goals of Hamas are of divine origin. Thus the alleged Jewish machinations will be punished by Allah: "When they ignite the fire of war, Allah will extinguish it. They will create havoc in the lands, but Allah does not love wrongdoers" (Qur'an 5:64)

An inquiry by "The Jerusalem Post" among Hamas-activists and employees revealed that some of them knew nothing about the anti-semitic articles in their own party programme. They claimed that it wasn't about Jews but about Israelis. Dr. Tamini stated that " The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a complete falsification, in reality a plot by the czarist secret service in 1910. It had "nothing to do" in the Charter of Hamas. Sheik Yasser Mansour from Nablus, no. 5 on the national Hamas list, will not exclude a reformulation of the Charter:
"It's not the Qur'an".

The original version of the Arabic Charter of Hamas is however difficult to find, say employees from MEMRI, the Middle East Media Institute Research Institute, with branches in Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. The institute has completed a new and comprehensive translation from Arabic and published it on the Internet.

The German researcher Dr. Matthias Kuentzel works on the first complete translation of the Charter into German. Due to divertingscientific interpretations of some expressions only some excerpts are - so far - published in a 2002 edition of the magazine "Young World".