Yousef is senior political adviser to Hamas PM, Ismail Haniyeh, talks to press:
Hamas scores publicity coup in U.S.
Shunned by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, the Islamist group Hamas scored a publicity coup this week by defending its policies in Gaza with opinion pieces in two of the country's most influential newspapers on the same day.
The New York Times and The Washington Post gave space to Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas figure, on Wednesday to argue that the United States should not interfere in Gaza, where Hamas took control after six days of bloody fighting against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah fighters.
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Hamas leaders rarely have access to major U.S. media to express their views unfiltered, and getting an opinion piece into the Times and the Post on the same day appeared unprecedented.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Free press at work.
Read them here:
A Leader of Hamas Warns of West Bank Peril for Fatah
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Engage With Hamas
We Earned Our Support
by Ahmed Yousef
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
This is news right, we should talk about it right?
How do we back away from another long term civil war? Or is this really part of the Clean Break Plan?
What do you think?
‘The Middle East today is like Europe on the eve of the Great War of 1914-18. It needs only a spark to set the whole region on fire’
How Israel and the United States Aim toward Disaster
What would it take to persuade Israel to rethink its attitude towards its Arab neighbours -- and primarily towards the Palestinians? The Hamas victory in Gaza is surely a clear signal that an Israeli change of direction is urgently needed.
All Israel’s efforts to break the democratically-elected Hamas government have failed. Its policies of boycott, siege and starvation, of bombing and shelling, of extra-judicial murder, of withholding tax revenues, of the systematic destruction of Palestinian institutions have served only to create a time-bomb of hunger, despair and defiance on Israel’s flank.
Yet Israel appears to have learned nothing. Instead of seeking peace with the Arabs -- instead of seizing their outstretched hand -- it persists in rejecting all peace overtures, preferring to rely on force and still more force, and on its ability to manipulate its American ally.
In Washington this week, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert managed to abort a tentative American initiative to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. He persuaded George W. Bush -- a President painfully out of his depth in Middle East politics -- that this was not the time for peace talks with either the Palestinians or the Syrians.
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As a result, Mahmud Abbas will move into ever greater illegitimacy and will be seen more and more as a Quisling; Fatah will continue its terminal decline; and Israel and its neighbours will be doomed to decades more of violence and war.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/...