Pat Dollard | Young Americans

“Throughout his campaign Obama’s official line was that he would “only talk with Hamas if it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and agrees to abide by past agreements.”

Yousef added: “The policy Obama will instate in the Middle East will differ from that of his predecessor George W. Bush, although it is clear that the region and the Palestinian issue will not be at the top of his agenda. [Obama] will focus more on the economic crisis, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

- Can someone please tell me why Obama has chosen to inform a major terrorist leader of his Big Picture plans for the Middle East, but not tell the American people?

By Aaron Klein - (WND)

JAFFA, Israel – A Hamas official’s claim his group held a meeting with advisers to President-elect Barack Obama has prompted infighting within the terrorist group, with some top members complaining such announcements do not serve its long-term interests, WND has learned.

Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’ chief political adviser in Gaza, told the leading Al-Hayat Arabic-language newspaper earlier this week Hamas held a meeting with Obama aides in Gaza and has maintained regular communication.

“We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to come out with any statements, as they may have a negative effect on his election campaign and be used by Republican candidate John McCain (to attack Obama),” Yousef told Al-Hayat.

Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, told the Jerusalem Post Monday, “This assertion is just plain false.”

Then, in a well-circulated but false report, the Xinhua-China news agency claimed Hamas released a statement yesterday denying it held any meetings with Obama advisers.

The statement, obtained by WND, did not deny the terror group met with Obama aides.

“The report in Al-Hayat was not accurate,” began the carefully worded Hamas statement, without identifying which part was inaccurate.

“Hamas does not comment on our private diplomatic activities. Ahmed Yousef’s statement and his opinions represent himself only. He is not a Hamas spokesman,” read the official Hamas statement.

A top Hamas source said Yousef’s announcement of meetings with Obama aides generated a “small crisis” within the terror group.

“We were not ready to make any such announcements,” the Hamas source said. “Yousef needs to hold his enthusiasm and stop making these statements that are not coordinated with all of the Hamas leadership.”

Contacted directly by WND, the offices of Ismail Haniyeh, the former Hamas prime minister, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, chief of Hamas in Gaza, both refused to deny the report of Hamas meetings with Obama aides.

Yousef could not be reached by WND for comment. Hamas sources said Yousef was directed to refrain from talking to the media for an unspecified period of time. It wasn’t clear which Obama aides Hamas is claiming to have met in Gaza.

Yousef gave WND a series of recent interviews in which he praised Obama as the leading candidate. Last week, he called Obama’s win a “historic victory” for the world and told WND that Hamas was sending a letter of congratulation to the president-elect.

Six months ago, Robert Malley, a Mideast expert described as an ancillary adviser to Obama, resigned amid a report in a London newspaper that he had contact with Hamas. According to some media reports, Malley is again representing Obama’s positions in meetings in Egypt and Syria, although it wasn’t immediately clear whether he was acting independently. FrontPageMagazine.com claims Malley was dispatched by Obama.

A senior Israeli security source told WND today Malley indeed recently represented Obama in meetings in Egypt and Syria.

Hamas is responsible for scores of suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings and cross-border raids. Its official charter calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel. Just today, Hamas members took responsibility for launching dozens of rockets from Gaza aimed at Jewish civilian population centers.

Last week, Yousef told WND of Obama’s win: “This is a historic day, a turning point. I think this is the very first time in history that one country’s election concerned everyone everywhere all over [the] world. Everybody is looking forward to Obama’s change, for a change in the U.S. policy, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian equation, which is the mother of all conflicts.”

Yousef said he believes an Obama administration will be more willing to engage in dialogue with Hamas.

He said Obama’s job will be to “restore America’s dignity in the world and put an end to the wars in the region.”

Yousef took the occasion to blast the policies of President Bush, commenting he hopes “that after January the Bush administration will not be heard from again.”

“We are sick of wars and conflict,” the Hamas official said.

Yousef seemed aware his comments may generate some negative publicity for Obama, but he said he feels it important to “reach out and to express our thoughts and engage.”

“I praised him six months ago, some people tried to use that against him. But I knew he would win. Like everyone else, we expected this important victory,” he said.

Yousef was referring to an interview he gave to WND and WABC Radio in April in which he praised Obama and then found his comments had fueled a firestorm of accusations in the presidential campaign.

In April, Yousef stated he hoped Obama would become president, comparing the Illinois senator to President John F. Kennedy.

“We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election,” Yousef told WND at the time.

“I hope Mr. Obama and the Democrats will change the political discourse. … I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance,” Yousef said.

Sen. John McCain repeatedly used Yousef’s remarks to criticize Obama’s judgment and foreign policy.

Reported Obama-Hamas Contacts Bode Ill

Another clash between Obama’s public statements and his team’s behind-the-scenes activities.

by P. David Hornik - (PJM)

In an interview published Tuesday in the London-based Al-Hayat, Dr. Ahmad Yousef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, said senior Hamas figures had held a secret meeting with advisers to Barack Obama in Gaza before the U.S. elections.

Throughout his campaign Obama’s official line was that he would “only talk with Hamas if it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and agrees to abide by past agreements.”

Yet Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal responded to Obama’s win on an optimistic note, telling Australia’s Sky News on Saturday that his organization was “ready for dialogue with President Obama and with the new American administration with an open mind.”

On Saturday night, though, Obama’s senior foreign policy coordinator Denis McDonough seemed to hold the fort, deflecting Mashaal’s amiability by reiterating Obama’s three-part formula for making Hamas acceptable.

For those who don’t want America to have dealings with an Islamist terror organization like Hamas, that may have sounded reassuring. But now it seems it may be too soon to feel reassured.

According to Yousef in the Al-Hayat interview, the Obama-Hamas talks were already ongoing during the U.S. election campaign: “We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to reveal this information as it may influence the elections or become manipulated by McCain’s campaign.”

Yousef also claimed he personally had friendly relations with some of Obama’s advisers and that “Haniyeh will draft a congratulatory letter to Obama for his victory.”

Yousef added: “The policy Obama will instate in the Middle East will differ from that of his predecessor George W. Bush, although it is clear that the region and the Palestinian issue will not be at the top of his agenda. [Obama] will focus more on the economic crisis, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”

A clash between Obama’s public, anodyne, mainstream statements and behind-the-scenes activities of a different nature would confirm the fears of those concerned about Obama’s history of association with radical people and ideologies.

Hamas was founded in December 1987 by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin — killed seventeen years later in an Israeli raid — and is the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. Already in 1988 Hamas began shooting, stabbing, and stoning Israelis to death (incidents are proudly listed in the organization’s “Glory Record,” a popular document on anti-Israeli websites).

That year Hamas also promulgated its charter, which states: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. … There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. … Jihad is [our] path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes.”

The deeply anti-Semitic charter also cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as “the embodiment of the Zionist plan to usurp Palestine.”

Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing in 1994, and is believed to have killed over 500 people and wounded thousands. Israel, the European Union, Canada — and the United States — officially boycott it and define it as a terrorist organization. Among its most famous attacks are the suicide bombings of:

- the Dolphinarium Disco in Tel Aviv in June 2001, which killed 21
- the Sbarro Restaurant in Jerusalem in August 2001, which killed 15
- the Park Hotel in Netanya in March 2002, which killed 30
- Jerusalem’s Egged bus no. 2 in August 2003, which killed 23

Since Israel’s withdrawal of all civilian and military personnel and installations from Gaza in August 2005, Hamas, with some help from other terror organizations, has fired over six thousand rockets at civilian targets within Israel. In June 2006, Hamas raided an Israeli army encampment on sovereign Israeli territory, killing two soldiers and kidnapping another, Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas has held ever since while denying him visits of any kind including by the Red Cross, a flouting of all legal norms.

While some of us have also criticized the Bush administration’s close contacts with Fatah — now the internationally accepted Palestinian Authority leadership — and especially its glorification of Fatah as a peace-seeker, certain differences between Hamas and Fatah are worth noting:

- Ongoing talks with Fatah leaders like PA President Mahmoud Abbas and top negotiator Ahmed Qureia are now bipartisan Israeli policy, with Likud prime ministerial aspirant Binyamin Netanyahu recently stating that he’ll continue these contacts if elected. For better or worse, in dealing with Fatah the U.S. — whether under Bush or Obama — is not in principle going farther than Israel goes. The bipartisan Israeli position toward Hamas, however, is that it is a sworn enemy seeking Israel’s destruction and that a political process with it is out of the question.

- Whatever their past activities, and despite the official PA’s ongoing inculcation of murderous anti-Israeli attitudes particularly through its education system, Fatah leaders like Abbas and Qureia are not currently known to be involved in terror attacks. Terror or “resistance” remains, however, Hamas’s raison d’être and its leadership is fully behind, for instance, the ongoing shelling of Israeli civilian targets from Gaza.

- Although there have been reports of Iranian backing and funding for Fatah, Hamas is directly, heavily, and explicitly backed and funded by Tehran and is a full-fledged member of the radical anti-Israeli, -American, and -Western axis that it leads and that also includes Syria and Hezbollah. And while Fatah’s supposed “secularism” is exaggerated and it too has adopted Islamist themes, Hamas’s expressly Islamist — albeit Sunni — ideology makes it a more natural client for Tehran.

All in all, it doesn’t add up to an organization the United States should be treating as even a potential friend. If that’s what Barack Obama’s advisers, with his blessing, have been up to, it’s not only an end-run around official U.S. policy but also cause for very serious worry.

(picture Kurt-Shop)