I hate Hamas.
This from an article in the Telegraph today bears reading with regard to their PR propaganda:
“The sight of those gaunt, hollow-eyed men being paraded like animals by cowardly terrorists in hoods undid all that. Then the testimonies came: Ohad Ben-Ami, 56, Eli Sharabi, 52, and 34-year-old Or Levy had been hung upside down, burned, gagged to the point of suffocation and starved, all the while being taunted and mocked. They had to learn to walk again before their release, they said. Suddenly, the veneer had split and the dark face of evil came leering through. On social media, the idiots, or some of them at least, began to finally realise what Israel had been facing all this time. They began to wonder whether perhaps those who expressed sympathy for Hamas might have been getting it wrong. It achieved, to the chagrin of the jihadis, “cut-through”. Hell, even the United Nations called the pictures “deeply distressing”.
You could see the terrorists and their supporters beginning to panic. Right on cue, a video purporting to be a Palestinian man before his imprisonment by Israel and thereafter made their way onto the internet. Before: Plump, smiling. After: horribly thin. See, both sides are as bad as each other! Closer inspection, however, called the clip into serious doubt. Within hours, many had concluded that the man’s name was not found on the list of released prisoners and that he was in fact a frail cancer patient.
Whatever the reality, when it comes to Hamas, truth is used merely as the agent of self-interest. So it was that within a short time, the jihadi group had suspended the release of all hostages until further notice, blaming “the enemy’s violations and failure to abide by the terms of the agreement”. This underlined what we had known all along: the strategy of Hamas is built around propaganda, with the deaths of Israelis, terrorists and masses of their own women and children all eagerly sacrificed for the sake of public opinion. The hostage releases, previously so successful, had become a PR liability. This seems likely the reason they were cancelled.”
** My underlining of text.