How Hamas Terrorizes Gaza’s Citizens

The U.S., along with the European Union and Israel, considers the Palestinian Hamas regime ensconced in Gaza a terrorist organization primarily because of its use of suicide bombers and its covenant which vows to replace Israel with a Palestinian Islamist state by force of arms. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, much less make peace with it. The Guardian reported on January 8, 2009 that

The incoming Obama administration [was] prepared to abandon George Bush’s doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organization, according to a source close to the transition team. In 2006 the U.S. Congress voted into law a ban on any U.S. financial aid to Hamas. Most recently, despite Congressional objections, the Obama administration [as reported by Breitbart.com] on April 13, 2012, sent $147 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Hamas-run Gaza for "humanitarian purposes.”

It has since been revealed, in a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), that Hamas is perpetrating gross human rights abuses against its own Palestinian people.

Joe Stork, Deputy Middle East Director for the New York-based HRW, charged this week that, "After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights, and grants impunity to abusive security services.”

According to Saudi-based Arab News, an HRW report titled "Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza” alleged that Hamas security services failed to inform relatives of the whereabouts of detainees, and had arrested and abused lawyers. Stork added that "Hamas should stop the kind of abuses that Egyptians and Syrians and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.”

Stork is right about Hamas’s abuse of its Gaza residents and is somewhat correct about Egyptians and Syrians risking their lives to bring an end to the arbitrary justice meted out by these authoritarian regimes. Regretfully, the Islamists have managed to hijack both revolutions, and it is apparent that Hamas’s Islamist "justice” will serves as a model for the future of criminal justice under the "revolutionary” Islamist regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Islamic Republic of Iran – a key supporter of (Sunni-Muslim) Hamas — is another example of Islamist justice (of the Shia variety) where torture, rape, and murder of detainees are commonplace. (continue reading...)