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Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia

Question:

just because [Hamas are] the "bad guys" Do you *really* think those inverted commas are necessary? Isn’t that a knee jerk moral relativism?

No.   It a definitional/situational relativism.   It’s meant to set off a name rather than a description.   Instead of reading as "the so called ‘bad guys’" it’s meant to be read as "what you named ‘bad guy’".   Similar but not the same. It is morality neutral and avoids implicitly accepting your descriptive phraseology. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – doesn’t mean you should believe all the unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" about them. Inverted commas are necessary there. You’re right, obviously. Now you might think it doesn’t matter one way or the other but it does. The invasion of Iraq thing was apparently based on unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" with an insufficient demand for evidence to back the charges. The evidence was unobtainable. When the Iraq committee published its report next month it will probably say that no WMD have been found in Iraq but a systemic attempt to deceive the UN *has* been discovered. Saddam was hiding something, or getting ready to hide something, but we have no evidence of what it was, or whether he had started to hide it. This means that the US and UK intelligence agencies were correct (Saddam *did* appear to be hiding something, and *was* lying to the world) but the inference drawn by the politicians (that because Saddam *appeared* to be hiding something he must *be* hiding something) may turn out to be mistaken, or unprovable. This may be one of those deeply irritating instances when the French president can say to les Anglos, ‘See, my judgement of the man was correct: he was bluffing’. Unfortunately, les Anglos cannot respect the judgement of French presidents to quite that extent, let alone the word of Iraqi dictators. And of course the assumed presence of WMD was just one of three or four justifications (or ‘justifications’ if you prefer) for the invasion.

Any of those others address the missing "imminent threat" issue? – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Are you suggesting that when Hamas make their public utterances, inbetween tearing the legs off half a dozen Israeli teenage girls with one bomb attack and blowing up a bus full of Israeli Arab street cleaners on their way home with another, we are obliged to think they are telling the truth? Murderers but not liars? There are two parts to Hamas – the military arm and the political arm.   So which one are we talking about here? I don’t make a distinction. By my definition in another thread, we are dealing with a political organisation (an organisation that exists in a political community) with a single loyalty (to the Palestinian cause in creating a worldwide caliphate) and a single ideology. Whatever means it uses to further its ends, it is by its ends, its intentions, that we judge it.

Then, should the mood and available resources coencide, by all means take DoD(sic) to task about his seperation of the US Deptartment of State from the US Administration as a whole. And do you really think the Palestinians are motivated by the desire to create a worldwide caliphate?   Not that they would necessarily be opposed to such a development but I don’t think that is their objective. And what ideology do they have other than the classic turf one? It seems to me that in attributing worldwide ideology driven motivations to the Palestinians themselve you are really projecting the US’s ideology driven desire to establish it’s own worldwide caliphate on what amounts to bedraggled and desperate population. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – When the military arm takes credit for blowing up a bus your suspicions about their statements seem to melt away.   Yet when the political arm says it doesn’t receive donations from SA your suspicions are present in full force. That’s the reverse of my accusation, yes. Killing and lying are both consistent with Hamas’s cause. They don’t take ‘credit’ when they kill Muslims, only Jews, so they lie even when they’re killing. There’s a ratching effect here you need to be careful with or you’re in danger of needlessly demonizing your opponent.   That interferes with clear thinking. I demonise their cause, not them.

You mean the ideologically motivated desire to establish a worldwide caliphate? I don’t see them as having that cause.   They seem much more tactically focused. To you specific question: is a murder a liar?   If the murderer doesn’t see himself as a murderer then he could be the most truth telling person you’d ever want to meet.    I mean a soldier isn’t automatically a liar simply because he kills is he? No, and a terrorist isn’t simply a murderer.

But "terrorist" is simply a label.   What I might label a soldier doesn’t affect my argument. These are not individuals, in the sense that their actions can be understood in isolation. They are part of a collectivity, with a  collective (political) loyalty. It is because of the nature of that loyalty, and their ideology, that we judge them to be liars, but only in this instance.

And what unique characteristic do you attribute to their collective, as opposed to yours, which makes you automatically ("we judge them to be liars") disbelieve everything they say? It seems to me you have already gone beyond my warning about demonizing the opponent and thereby losing the ability to think clearly. Whatever Hamas do we have to judge what is in their interests. Is it in their interests to be discovered taking funds from Saudi? No, because the US can apply pressure to the Saudi government and possibly stop it. So they lie.

In a way you are saying there is no evidence that SA is giving money to Hamas. For if there were the US would already have it and already be pressuring SA. So this story about "Hamas denies…etc" seems meant for internal political consumption by your own collective. But if they were discovered taking funds from mosques all over the world, they wouildn’t lie, because it’s in their interests to be seen by Muslims as a popular militia. They aren’t pathological liars or killers, they are terrorists. They have a *plan*.

Again, "terrorists" is a label.   You can hang it on anybody engaged in the violence biz especially if they oppose your collective or its precepts. If a murderer does see himself as a murderer then he is likely to lie to the max to try and hide the fact of his murders.   However he’s not automatically going to lie about wheher he paid Inland Revenue – what would be the point? If a murderer, whether or not he saw himself as a murderer, did not lie about his killings then why would he then be likely to lie to Inland Revenue? Like I said, you’re confusing a pathology – the individual’s need to kill – with ideology – the terrorist collective’s need to achieve its political ends by any means necessary.

Would such means involve invading another country? But you are correct, killing by and for a collective is much different than killing by and for an individual as far as motivations and the nature of the killers is concerned. And collectives kill best when their ideology overcomes the individual’s reluctance to kill. In the case of Palestine however I don’t see a world spanning ideology at work – just somebody who wants their own turf.   Not that the Palestinian situation isn’t being used by opposing collectives with world spanning ideologies but that the Palestinians themselves have no such thing as a primary motivator. Basically I don’t see a strong correlation between Hamas’ military arm and it’s activities and whether or not Hamas’ political arm would lie about SA funding. That’s because you’re looking for what motivates the individual instead of the collective. You’re American right? Say no more… ;-)

Western Hemisphere.   New arrivals and all that.   Were trying to get away from the collectivist bullshit from the old world. However Hamas might have other good reasons to lie about SA funding so if you have evidence or supposition about that then please give. Better, if you have records of cash flow from SA to Hamas as evidence then so much the better.   We could work backwards from that to try and figure out why they would lie about it.   But they aren’t lying about it, IMO, simply because the Hamas military arm is blowing up Israelis. Sure they are. Israel, USA, the Saudi gvt – they are all enemies of Hamas.

If SA is an enemy of Hamas then why would it be sending them money? Hamas wants them destroyed. But Hamas needs something too: the support of the mass of Muslim people. So they are involved in propganda and party politics as well as terrorism (not unlike the IRA, who  publicly lie whenever it suits them), to win that support. Everything they do and say must be judged by a pair of criteria: will this confound Hamas’s enemies; will this win Hamas friends?

Sounds like Washington should try their consultants for a while.   They could use some pointers. I can think of reasons why Hamas would not want us to know they get their money from Saudi, and I can think of reasons why they *would* want us to know. Hence my ’suspicions’. [snip] My opposition was based on it being an illegal, unjust and immoral invasion. Not illegal (no ‘law’ broken), unjust needs defining, immoral is a ludicrous charge given that Saddam would still be in power had the invasion not taken place.

Invasion is, by default, illegal. Unjust rests on "imminent threat". Immoral is … read more »

Response:

No. That’s the point. Hamas claims ‘legitimacy’. In which case, let’s see the invoices, boys. You made the charge show me the evidence. I didn’t make the charge, I just have my suspicions.

Fair enough.   I have suspicions too.   But just because they’re the "bad guys" doesn’t mean you should believe all the unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" about them. Now you might think it doesn’t matter one way or the other but it does.   The invasion of Iraq thing was apparently based on unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" with an insufficient demand for evidence to back the charges. Are you suggesting that when Hamas make their public utterances, inbetween tearing the legs off half a dozen Israeli teenage girls with one bomb attack and blowing up a bus full of Israeli Arab street cleaners on their way home with another, we are obliged to think they are telling the truth? Murderers but not liars?

There are two parts to Hamas – the military arm and the political arm.   So which one are we talking about here? When the military arm takes credit for blowing up a bus your suspicions about their statements seem to melt away.   Yet when the political arm says it doesn’t receive donations from SA your suspicions are present in full force. There’s a ratching effect here you need to be careful with or you’re in danger of needlessly demonizing your opponent.   That interferes with clear thinking. To you specific question: is a murder a liar?   If the murderer doesn’t see himself as a murderer then he could be the most truth telling person you’d ever want to meet.    I mean a soldier isn’t automatically a liar simply because he kills is he? If a murderer does see himself as a murderer then he is likely to lie to the max to try and hide the fact of his murders.   However he’s not automatically going to lie about wheher he paid Inland Revenue – what would be the point? If a murderer, whether or not he saw himself as a murderer, did not lie about his killings then why would he then be likely to lie to Inland Revenue? Basically I don’t see a strong correlation between Hamas’ military arm and it’s activities and whether or not Hamas’ political arm would lie about SA funding. However Hamas might have other good reasons to lie about SA funding so if you have evidence or supposition about that then please give. Better, if you have records of cash flow from SA to Hamas as evidence then so much the better.   We could work backwards from that to try and figure out why they would lie about it.   But they aren’t lying about it, IMO, simply because the Hamas military arm is blowing up Israelis. Your little trick with Iraq ("prove you don’t have WMD") isn’t going to work in future for a good long while. If we are talking about Hamas, a known terrorist organisation and enemy of us all, the ordinary legal convention of assuming innocence is made null and void: we know they are guilty because they say so. We know they have WFMD (weapons of fairly minimal destruction) because they use them, all the time. It isn’t ‘my’ ‘trick’, or a ‘trick’ at all; thus, I don’t see on what grounds ‘it’ (if you mean retaliation) won’t ‘work’ – the IDF retaliate pretty much every day too.

Um, see above.   I’m not assuming they’re innocent.   Only that you may be guilty of too hasty demonsization. What bothers me is your apparant glee in the assumption that opposition to the Iraq invasion fom people who, having changed the basis of their opposition from the stoking of fears of conflagration in the ME, which never happened, and of the ‘millions dead’ who never were – except at the hands of Saddam – to an after-the-event latching on to the Case of the Undiscovered Weaponry, which they believed existed all along, to the extent of wishing further humiliation on the UN inspectorate in its fruitless hunt for them) might stop the only people with the power to prevent even more terrorism from doing their job.

My opposition was based on it being an illegal, unjust and immoral invasion. Secondary posibilities, such as conflagration in the ME, millions dead, weren’t primary.   They were risks.   Risks that you evaluate *AFTER* you decide to consider what you might do.   I never even got to the risks parts – I was stuck back on it being the wrong thing to do period. And "imminent threat" is the only possible excuse for invading Iraq and such a threat was very questionable before the invasion and, as we now see, a complete tissue of wishful thinking and geopolitical game playing. Will you only be happy when the democratic world is so paralysed with fear of Islamist terrorism that it can no longer react to … Islamist terrorism?

No.   Does the democratic world really fear Islamist terrorism?   Most of the democratic nations of the earth opposed the invasion of Iraq.   Perhaps they fear Islamist terrorism but not to the point of acting immorally, illegally and unjustly. This is where the paralysis will come from – a moral paralysis when the US realizes its acted like the worst bastard of the 20th century at the behest of ideological neocon crazies and is paralysed precisely at the point where it has pissed off the greatest number and a real Islamist threat has been created by its own hand. In other words, when and if it says to itself "Omigod, look at what I’ve done" in doing the wrong things and freezes up so that it can’t do the right things. Where’s the sense in that?

The sense is in maintaining the principled moral high ground.   The despair/cynicism that will occur when you realize you’ve been slogging around in the muck with the "bad guys" is the risk.

Response:

just because [Hamas are] the "bad guys"

Do you *really* think those inverted commas are necessary? Isn’t that a knee jerk moral relativism? doesn’t mean you should believe all the unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" about them.

Inverted commas are necessary there. You’re right, obviously. Now you might think it doesn’t matter one way or the other but it does.   The invasion of Iraq thing was apparently based on unsubstantiated statements by the "good guys" with an insufficient demand for evidence to back the charges.

The evidence was unobtainable. When the Iraq committee published its report next month it will probably say that no WMD have been found in Iraq but a systemic attempt to deceive the UN *has* been discovered. Saddam was hiding something, or getting ready to hide something, but we have no evidence of what it was, or whether he had started to hide it. This means that the US and UK intelligence agencies were correct (Saddam *did* appear to be hiding something, and *was* lying to the world) but the inference drawn by the politicians (that because Saddam *appeared* to be hiding something he must *be* hiding something) may turn out to be mistaken, or unprovable. This may be one of those deeply irritating instances when the French president can say to les Anglos, ‘See, my judgement of the man was correct: he was bluffing’. Unfortunately, les Anglos cannot respect the judgement of French presidents to quite that extent, let alone the word of Iraqi dictators. And of course the assumed presence of WMD was just one of three or four justifications (or ‘justifications’ if you prefer) for the invasion. Are you suggesting that when Hamas make their public utterances, inbetween tearing the legs off half a dozen Israeli teenage girls with one bomb attack and blowing up a bus full of Israeli Arab street cleaners on their way home with another, we are obliged to think they are telling the truth? Murderers but not liars? There are two parts to Hamas – the military arm and the political arm.   So which one are we talking about here?

I don’t make a distinction. By my definition in another thread, we are dealing with a political organisation (an organisation that exists in a political community) with a single loyalty (to the Palestinian cause in creating a worldwide caliphate) and a single ideology. Whatever means it uses to further its ends, it is by its ends, its intentions, that we judge it. When the military arm takes credit for blowing up a bus your suspicions about their statements seem to melt away.   Yet when the political arm says it doesn’t receive donations from SA your suspicions are present in full force.

That’s the reverse of my accusation, yes. Killing and lying are both consistent with Hamas’s cause. They don’t take ‘credit’ when they kill Muslims, only Jews, so they lie even when they’re killing. There’s a ratching effect here you need to be careful with or you’re in danger of needlessly demonizing your opponent.   That interferes with clear thinking.

I demonise their cause, not them. To you specific question: is a murder a liar?   If the murderer doesn’t see himself as a murderer then he could be the most truth telling person you’d ever want to meet.    I mean a soldier isn’t automatically a liar simply because he kills is he?

No, and a terrorist isn’t simply a murderer. These are not individuals, in the sense that their actions can be understood in isolation. They are part of a collectivity, with a  collective (political) loyalty. It is because of the nature of that loyalty, and their ideology, that we judge them to be liars, but only in this instance. Whatever Hamas do we have to judge what is in their interests. Is it in their interests to be discovered taking funds from Saudi? No, because the US can apply pressure to the Saudi government and possibly stop it. So they lie. But if they were discovered taking funds from mosques all over the world, they wouildn’t lie, because it’s in their interests to be seen by Muslims as a popular militia. They aren’t pathological liars or killers, they are terrorists. They have a *plan*. If a murderer does see himself as a murderer then he is likely to lie to the max to try and hide the fact of his murders.   However he’s not automatically going to lie about wheher he paid Inland Revenue – what would be the point? If a murderer, whether or not he saw himself as a murderer, did not lie about his killings then why would he then be likely to lie to Inland Revenue?

Like I said, you’re confusing a pathology – the individual’s need to kill – with ideology – the terrorist collective’s need to achieve its political ends by any means necessary. Basically I don’t see a strong correlation between Hamas’ military arm and it’s activities and whether or not Hamas’ political arm would lie about SA funding.

That’s because you’re looking for what motivates the individual instead of the collective. You’re American right? Say no more… ;-) However Hamas might have other good reasons to lie about SA funding so if you have evidence or supposition about that then please give. Better, if you have records of cash flow from SA to Hamas as evidence then so much the better.   We could work backwards from that to try and figure out why they would lie about it.   But they aren’t lying about it, IMO, simply because the Hamas military arm is blowing up Israelis.

Sure they are. Israel, USA, the Saudi gvt – they are all enemies of Hamas. Hamas wants them destroyed. But Hamas needs something too: the support of the mass of Muslim people. So they are involved in propganda and party politics as well as terrorism (not unlike the IRA, who  publicly lie whenever it suits them), to win that support. Everything they do and say must be judged by a pair of criteria: will this confound Hamas’s enemies; will this win Hamas friends? I can think of reasons why Hamas would not want us to know they get their money from Saudi, and I can think of reasons why they *would* want us to know. Hence my ’suspicions’. [snip] My opposition was based on it being an illegal, unjust and immoral invasion.

Not illegal (no ‘law’ broken), unjust needs defining, immoral is a ludicrous charge given that Saddam would still be in power had the invasion not taken place. Secondary posibilities, such as conflagration in the ME, millions dead, weren’t primary.   They were risks.

Actually, they were scaremongering. The idea that a bunch of students understand these risks better than the military is silly.   Risks that you evaluate *AFTER* you decide to consider what you might do.   I never even got to the risks parts – I was stuck back on it being the wrong thing to do period. And "imminent threat" is the only possible excuse for invading Iraq

What does ‘imminent’ mean? What if you only suspect that a threat is imminent, but can’t prove it? What about the mistreatment of the Iraqi people? and such a threat was very questionable before the invasion and, as we now see, a complete tissue of wishful thinking and geopolitical game playing.

I disagree. Will you only be happy when the democratic world is so paralysed with fear of Islamist terrorism that it can no longer react to … Islamist terrorism? No.   Does the democratic world really fear Islamist terrorism?

My implied question was, *should not* the democratic world fear Islamist terrorism?   Most of the democratic nations of the earth opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Debatable, but the people certainly did, yes.   Perhaps they fear Islamist terrorism but not to the point of acting immorally, illegally and unjustly.

…which are loaded terms and unhelpful. The question is, how *should* we act? This is where the paralysis will come from – a moral paralysis when the US realizes its acted like the worst bastard of the 20th century

Really? Worse than Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Idi Amin? Osama? This is the reason your charge of immorality is so worthless. Your criteria is wanting, to say the least. The US/UK have just remioved the worsty living tyrant from power – and *they* are immoral? Madness… at the behest of ideological neocon crazies

You’re sounding somewhat ‘tribal’ Isaac… and is paralysed precisely at the point where it has pissed off the greatest number and a real Islamist threat has been created by its own hand.

Impossible. In other words, when and if it says to itself "Omigod, look at what I’ve done" in doing the wrong things and freezes up so that it can’t do the right things.

Well, I agree that if that *is* the USA’s reaction, it’s screwed. Let’s hope it isn’t persuaded to do so. Where’s the sense in that? The sense is in maintaining the principled moral high ground.

But you haven’t *got* one. Saddam is a tyrant. The Iraqis wanted us to remove him. We are all safer. Why is that immoral?  The despair/cynicism that will occur when you realize you’ve been slogging around in the muck with the "bad guys" is the risk.

The bad guys in this context are Hamas, who I wouuld traet a great deal more forcibly than you, I think.

Response:

Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia

Bullshit !

Response:

Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia Bullshit !

No, really.   They did deny it.   Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Response:

Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia Bullshit ! No, really.   They did deny it.  

And you … believe them, right? Do you have evidence to the contrary?

No. That’s the point. Hamas claims ‘legitimacy’. In which case, let’s see the invoices, boys.

Response:

– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia Bullshit ! No, really.   They did deny it. And you … believe them, right? Do you have evidence to the contrary? No. That’s the point. Hamas claims ‘legitimacy’. In which case, let’s see the invoices, boys.

You made the charge show me the evidence. Your little trick with Iraq ("prove you don’t have WMD") isn’t going to work in future for a good long while.

Response:

No. That’s the point. Hamas claims ‘legitimacy’. In which case, let’s see the invoices, boys. You made the charge show me the evidence.

I didn’t make the charge, I just have my suspicions. Are you suggesting that when Hamas make their public utterances, inbetween tearing the legs off half a dozen Israeli teenage girls with one bomb attack and blowing up a bus full of Israeli Arab street cleaners on their way home with another, we are obliged to think they are telling the truth? Murderers but not liars? Your little trick with Iraq ("prove you don’t have WMD") isn’t going to work in future for a good long while.

If we are talking about Hamas, a known terrorist organisation and enemy of us all, the ordinary legal convention of assuming innocence is made null and void: we know they are guilty because they say so. We know they have WFMD (weapons of fairly minimal destruction) because they use them, all the time. It isn’t ‘my’ ‘trick’, or a ‘trick’ at all; thus, I don’t see on what grounds ‘it’ (if you mean retaliation) won’t ‘work’ – the IDF retaliate pretty much every day too. What bothers me is your apparant glee in the assumption that opposition to the Iraq invasion (from people who, having changed the basis of their opposition from the stoking of fears of conflagration in the ME, which never happened, and of the ‘millions dead’ who never were – except at the hands of Saddam – to an after-the-event latching on to the Case of the Undiscovered Weaponry, which they believed existed all along, to the extent of wishing further humiliation on the UN inspectorate in its fruitless hunt for them) might stop the only people with the power to prevent even more terrorism from doing their job. Will you only be happy when the democratic world is so paralysed with fear of Islamist terrorism that it can no longer react to … Islamist terrorism? Where’s the sense in that?

Response:

Hamas denies receiving donations from Saudi Arabia Occupied Jerusalem: 17 September, 2003 (IAP News) Hamas has denied reports disseminated by Israel and pro zionist circles that the movement receives donations and funds from Saudi Arabia. "This is part of the over-all Zionist onslaught against Islam and Muslims. I assure you we don’t receive money from Saudi Arabia or any other country. We don’t need money from abroad. We have enough money inside Palestine," said a high-ranking Hamas official in Ramallah. Abu Muhammed, who only gave his non de guerre, said Hamas was very sparing in its spending. "We don’t squander money, and strive to make every dollar count." Abu Muhammed pointed out that up to 90% of Hamas financial resources come from ordinary Muslim individuals. "You know each and every financially able Muslim is required to pay Zakat, or alms, so Muslims from all over the world pay to us to feed and take care of the orphan and the needy." The Hebrew Press on Tuesday quoted some Zionist sources as claiming that half of Hamas funds came from sources in Saudi Arabia, but no concrete proof was given for the allegation. The United States and some European countries have frozen the assets and bank accounts of several charities that offer financial assistance to Palestinians, using the claim that they are linked to Palestinian resistance groups, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as a pre-text. The flagrant measures have hit mainly the most vulnerable segments of the impoverished Palestinian society, namely orphans, widows and people suffering abject poverty. According to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development  (UNCTAD) in 2002, per capita gross national income for Palestinians (which includes non-domestic income) fell to 46 per cent of its 1999 level, almost two thirds of the population in the West Bank and Gaza (2 million) live below the $2-a-day poverty line, and unemployment soared to unprecedented levels, with the average annual unemployment rate exceeding 40 per cent well into 2003. The report can be read online at: http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/tb50d4_en.pdf Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) 10661 South Roberts Rd, Suite 202 Palos Hills, IL 60465 Tel: 708 974 3380 / Fax: 708 974 3389 /Pager: 1 800 481 4306 Proudly serving Palestine and al Quds To Subscribe visit: http://www.iap.org/subscribe.htm The Islamic Association For Palestine (IAP) is a national grassroots organization serving the American Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities and dedicated to advancing a just and comprehensive solution to the cause of Palestine.

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