Monday, March 31, 2008

CRIKEY: Greg Sheridan catches up on Hamas.


What an extraordinary genius Greg Sheridan is!

On Saturday, he wrote in The Australian:

The failure to understand that Islamist terrorism is a religious, ideological movement, with a coherent if grotesque world view, is one of many failures of Western commentators. Reading the Islamists' documents would be a good place to start in remedying that so far abject failure.


He's right. But the thing is that the failure isn't of genuine commentators and scholars but of neo-Con pundits whose focus isn't on promoting an understanding of such groups but rather on generating as much hatred for them as possible.

HAMAS has been around since 1987. Even a novice like myself has known about the HAMAS Charter for over a decade, which I first read back in 1993 when its English translation was published in the Journal of Palestine Studies. The same journal in 1995 published a major study of HAMAS.

Now, in 2008, Sheridan has discovered the significance of the HAMAS charter.

He's also been chosen as one of our “best and brightest” to sit on his 2020 Summit committee to discuss "Australia's Future Security and Prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world".

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf