Retaliation and Massacre

Truly sad:

Hamas on Friday claimed responsibility for a gun attack which killed eight Jewish students at a Jerusalem religious school the night before. “Hamas is responsible for the attack. The Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades will officially claim the attack at the right moment,” a senior Hamas official in Gaza told AFP on condition of anonymity, referring to the group’s armed wing.

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Eight students – most of them 15 or 16 years old – were killed when a Palestinian, a resident of Occupied East Jerusalem, entered the school and sprayed automatic gunfire before being gunned down by security forces late on Thursday.

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Two armed Hamas men standing nearby said that “the international community and even some Arab states condemned this attack in Jerusalem but they took their time for our 130 dead over the past week.”

“We are only protecting ourselves from the daily Israeli attacks,” one said. “They kill our children and we are expected not to react? We are not afraid of them, and we are ready to die for our land. Every Palestinian prays for Allah to let him die a martyr.”

Here’s the beef I have with Hamas.  Now it is true they are the legitimate government for the Palestinians (they control a majority, well the did, of parliament), they provide health care, education, and relative protection (to a point) from Israeli attack.

Now the one thing that many leftists and socialists have to understand is that while they are a resitance force to a brutal occupation, they are also a reactionary right-wing religious organization.  That being the case, they do not respect women’s rights, they will attack LGBTQI folk, and use religion as an excuse for actions just like above.

As a resistance force they should respect the rights of the Geneva Conventions, regardless of what Israel does.  One perfect example of this is the New People’s Army of the Philippines, a Marxist guerrilla outfit that uses the Geneva Conventions as a guideline (while the Philippine government does not) and tries to limit civilian casualites while attacking police, government offices, and the army.

Unlike a reactionary religious org that has thinking akin to Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., they  respect LGBTQI people, women, a person’s right to choice their belief system, etc.

Just food for thought.

Image From:
Al Jazeera English (Qatar)