Hamas in the New York Times
Today's New York Times op-ed page has a piece from an alternate universe. The piece, "What Hamas Wants," is by the political adviser to Hamas' since-deposed Palestinian prime minister.
THE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.
From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.
Maybe the reason is because all of these "points" are bogus. Unilateral cease fire? Was there a single day that rockets weren't launched from Gaza into southern Israel?
And Hamas' "platform for peace?"
Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
The Times has periodically turned over its op-ed pages to radicals, but I can't recall the last time it was turned over to terrorists. (I hesitate to say this is the first time. This is the New York Times we're talking about.)
And to run this piece of propaganda without even offering a companion guide to all of the falsehoods in it isn't responsible journalism. For example:
The streets of Gaza are now calm for the first time in a very long time. We have begun disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs and we hope to restore a sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza.
Yeah, I suppose the streets are calm now -- especially after you've killed at least two peace demonstrators and two U.N. aid workers.
Next week maybe the Times will publish Osama bin Laden's latest fatwa on the op-ed page without comment.
I didn't think the Times editorial page could get much worse -- once again they exceed my already low expectations.
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The WaPo last year gave Haniyeh himself (no advisor) op-ed space. So the NYT is a bit late to this kind of depravity.
(I later found out that Haniyeh didn't write the op-ed himself, and my guess is that Yousef didn't write this one either.)
I raised a couple of questions about the Yousef op-ed, however it would seem that the Times violated its own policy about op-eds
Does it help to be famous? Not really. In fact, the bar of acceptance gets nudged a little higher for people who have the means to get their message out in other ways — elected officials, heads of state, corporate titans. It's incumbent on them to say something forthright and unexpected. Op-Ed real estate is too valuable to be taken up with press releases.
What about the Yousef piece was either forthright or unexpected?
[...] week, the New York Times gave a hint as to what their response might be to such an overture when it printed an op-ed by the PR man for [...]