Hamas frequently boasts how much it looks forward to death. So don't be surprised if the terror group engineers a made-to-order massacre that it can them blame Israel for. Sounds preposterous? Professor Richard Landes lays it out in chilling detail:
Whether by Israeli accident or Hamas engineering, expect a spectacular civilian massacre in the coming days, followed by an orgy of Pallywood photography, amplified by a compliant Western media, and even greater fury in the streets of the Muslim and Western world. It’s in the Hamas playbook… and will be until the media gets sober. Here’s the background, and the obscenity that will probably be played.
Barry Rubin has laid out the various endgames open to Hamas, and how, when all else fails, it’s the media reserves you draw on to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat . . . .
But what if the Israelis don’t make a mistake and kill a significant number of people in one blow, like Gaza Beach or Kfar Qana? . . . .
Would Hamas secretly blow up its own people in order to blame Israel? Certainly, their ideology would justify such a move. As Hamas representative Fathi Hamad said last February, “Palestinains have created a human shield against the Zionist bombing machine.”
For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life. [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) Feb. 29, 2008]
. . .
So far, Hamas has Israel exactly where they want them, exactly where Hizbullah had them — thinking they’ve won the media war even as, for days the world has been treated to a constant barrage of Palestinian victims in picture and narrative, with violent demonstrations in the streets of the Arab and Western world pressuring their unwilling governments to side with feared and hated Hamas, with Jews around the world endangered, and no end in sight because Hamas will fight to the last drop of their own people’s blood…
Time for a media spectacular.
And Israel will only be the most obvious loser.
Read the whole thing, and see this related item from Memri (via Solomonia). You've been warned.
