14 June 2006

A Little Light Reading

Reading the latest Democratiya I was drawn to the Marko Attila Hoare’s Occidentalism and 'Anti-Imperialism' and Evan Daniel’s Is there an 'Islamic Imperialism'? and in particular to :

“However, the nature of Hamas is often misunderstood. Unlike the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Hamas is neither the embodiment of pan-Arab aspirations nor of Palestinian self-determination. It is not a political movement for national liberation that contains an armed wing. Hamas has articulated the far broader goal of establishing a global Islamist empire. This is in line with it's ideological parent organisation, 'which viewed its violent opposition to Zionism from the 1930s and 1940s as an integral part of the Manichean struggle for the creation of a worldwide caliphate rather than the defence of the Palestinian Arabs' national rights' (p. 213-4). According to Karsh, for Hamas, the issue of Palestine is 'neither an ordinary territorial dispute between two national movements not a struggle by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier. It is a holy war by the worldwide Islamic umma to present the loss of a part of the House of Islam to the infidels' (p. 214).

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