"Do you condemn Hamas?" Many of Hamas' strongest Palestinian critics & rivals would always answer like Mahmoud "I condemn the killing of civilians"
https://x.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1947932994372583583
"Do you condemn Hamas?"
Many of Hamas' strongest Palestinian critics & rivals would always answer like Mahmoud "I condemn the killing of civilians"
Because we know this question aims to:
1- Distract from genocide
2- Whitewash genocide
3- Blame Palestinians for Israel's genocide
Israel eagerly weaponizes any Palestinian criticism of Hamas to say "look, Palestinians agree with us. Khamas is THE problem. Khamas is to blame for Palestinian suffering".
A Gazan activist whom Hamas had once detained arbitrarily told me he refused to condemn them in the midst of genocide b/c his the blood of his family & friends would be on his hands when Israel uses his condemnation to manufacture consent for genocide.
The very same mainstream media interviewers asking this question would always follow it with two more if the interviewee condemns Hamas:
1- "Doesn't Israel then have the right to destroy the very Hamas you just condemned & admitted to be THE problem?"
Israel isn't even trying to "destroy khamas," they've been using this as a pretext to wipe out & starve Gaza itself (over 90% of all homes destroyed), while Hamas is still intact, per Israel's own admission.
2- "Do you blame Hamas at all for bringing the onslaught onto [your family]?" as one journalist literally asked a Gazan whose entire family Israel massacred.
I've personally criticized Hamas for over a decade. Then when the genocide unfolded, I immediately understood that any such criticism would be a gift to Israel to weaponize to buy time & support for their killing of my family, friends, colleagues, neighbours & loved ones.
To ask “Do you condemn Hamas?” in the midst of an unfolding genocide is not a search for moral clarity — it is a weaponized litmus test designed to dehumanize, to silence, and to shift culpability from the colonizer to the colonized.
It is a trap laid by those who feign concern for civilian life only when it serves the machinery of the oppressor, never when Palestinian blood floods the streets. It is a demand that Palestinians participate in their own erasure, that they indict themselves so Israel’s atrocities can proceed with a cleaner conscience in Western eyes.
But no oppressed people owe their occupiers — or the global spectators cheering them on — a performance of "balanced grief" while their children are buried under rubble. The true obscenity is not whether Palestinians condemn Hamas, but that the world continues to ask this, while remaining deafeningly silent as Gaza is turned to ash.
posted by Satish Sharma at
07:25
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