The Associated Press may deserve credit for its story on Hamas’s apparent embrace of ‘non-violence’ but did the wire service even realize the alternate reality its journalists uncovered?
The story opens as follows:
In a sit-in tent camp near the Gaza border with Israel, a lecturer answered questions from activists grappling with the concept of non-violent protest.
They asked what’s allowed, listing different actions. Throwing stones and holding rallies is permitted, he said. Throwing firebombs is a “maybe” and using knives a definite “no.”
So it appears that anything that doesn’t involve suicide bombings, rocket attacks, shootings or stabbings is now classified as “non-violent” according to Hamas and Palestinian activists.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines violence as behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.
It also defines it as the unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation by the exhibition of such force.
In either of these definitions, throwing stones or firebombs would be considered to be an act of violence. In any civilized society, these actions would be both unacceptable and unlawful.
So why then has the media adopted the Hamas definition of non-violence, which simply allows Palestinians to carry out dictionary defined acts of violence as long as they happen to be carried out without the aid of a gun or knife?
According to the AP:
Hamas has kept the pressure on Israel by at least telegraphing an embrace of nonviolence. For example, top leader Ismail Haniyeh recently spoke against the backdrop of posters of icons such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
The AP doesn’t mention that this backdrop of posters also included Gandhi.
Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh gives speech under visages of Ghandi, King and Mandela. If he actually followed their lead his terrorist org would disarm – for the greater good of all Gazans. pic.twitter.com/L5xghRnh8K
— Neri Zilber (@NeriZilber) April 10, 2018
While Mandela and his ANC party did employ violence in the struggle against South African apartheid, it is an insult to both Gandhi and Martin Luther King that Hamas can make any comparison between itself and the advocates of real non-violence.
According to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, King’s notion of non-violence had six key principles, including:
- One can resist evil without resorting to violence;
- Non-violence seeks to win the “friendship and understanding” of the opponent, not to humiliate him;
- Those committed to nonviolence must be willing to suffer without retaliation as suffering itself can be redemptive;
- The resister should be motivated by love in the sense of “understanding,” or “redeeming good will for all men.”
Does this really sound like Hamas’s definition of non-violent protest?
This is the reality of the protests at the Gaza border:
Why is it non-violent when Palestinians throw stones and firebombs yet anyone else would be arrested and prosecuted for doing the same thing in another country? Is it the bigotry of low expectations that judges Palestinians by such low standards of what constitutes non-violent activities?
Why have the media given a free pass to Hamas and Palestinian rioters when it comes to defining what non-violence is?
The Associated Press has written a decent article. It looks, however, that the wire service didn’t follow through and reach the obvious conclusions : Hamas and non-violence aren’t exactly a marriage made in heaven.
Featured image: freevector.com and Flash90/Sliman Khader, with modifications.
