KINSELLA: Donald Trump's latest Israel-Hamas peace deal yet another joke
· Toronto Sun
TRUMP ANNOUNCES GAZA BREAKTHROUGH – that was CNN .
TRUMP CLAIMS HAMAS HAS AGREED TO DISARMAMENT DEAL IN GAZA – that one, The New York Times .
Visit afrikasportnews.co.za for more information.
TRUMP SAYS HAMAS AGREED TO NEXT PHASE OF GAZA PEACE DEAL –CBS News .
TRUMP ANNOUNCES HAMAS DISARMAMENT DEAL –NBC News .
So went Friday’s front pages, or the tops of major news websites. The best reaction, however, came on formerly pro-Trump news platforms in Israel: nothing.
TV7 Israel News , I24 News , Israel Hayom : no triumphant proclamation of Trump’s “breakthrough” at all. Zero.
There is a reason for that. No one who knows anything at all about Hamas, or Trump, believes any of it. Even Israeli right-wing media – the most pro-MAGA media on Earth, until recently – didn’t buy it.
As the respected Israeli journalist David Horovitz pithily wrote in the Times of Israel : Trump’s many previous claims about peace have simply been “false,” full stop.
Because they have been. During his on-off war on Iran, for instance, Trump falsely claimed that peace was at hand at least 38 times. As of this week, Iran is still bombarding U.S. military bases, hammering Gulf region Arab states with air strikes, and aiming drones at ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Does that sound like peace?
Donald Trump’s claims farcical
Trump’s claims, as with most everything that emanates from the U.S. President, are made-up. They are farcical. Whenever Trump resorts to all-caps – as he did in his Truth Social post on Thursday evening, calling the peace deal “HISTORIC,” “COMPLETE DISARMAMENT,” and a guarantee of “PEACE and SECURITY” – he is engaged in what psychologists call the Illusory Truth Effect.
That is, by amplifying and repeating specific words, Trump tips us off to what is false. (Whether the President knows they are false is a question for the psychologists.)
Israel, for its part, said it would not withdraw from parts of Hamas territory in Gaza until the terror group disarms. Hamas, meanwhile, said it would not disarm until Israel withdraws. Checkmate.
Which side should go first? Continuing his administration’s anti-Israel tilt, Trump darkly warned he would be “very, very disappointed” if the Jewish state – not Hamas – did not adhere to the terms of the agreement. JD Vance is smiling, somewhere.
So who is to be believed? Certainly not Hamas.
The Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has always been very candid about their ultimate objective. It is total and unrelenting war against Israel and the West.
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In their 1988 Hamas Charter, which officially bears the weighty title of the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, the terror group states that they will “obliterate” the Jewish state, quote unquote.
“Israel, Judaism and Jews,” write Hamas in Article 28, are “a vicious invasion.”
Zionists, Jews, are “Nazis,” says Hamas, and salvation will not come until “Muslims fight the Jews, kill the Jews.”
They go on: “The Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’ … Jihad (that is, holy war) is the path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”
Hamas has never renounced their 1988 Charter. It remains their supreme statute, their holy constitution. It is what corporations like to call a mission statement.
That mission is not fulfilled by chirpy chit-chats about peace and ceasefires, Hamas says.
“So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” they declare in the Charter. “Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the Palestinian question … These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Muslims as arbitrators. When did the infidels do justice to the believers?”
“Infidels,” by the way, is anyone who does not observe Hamas’ extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam. It includes Jews, Christians, moderate Muslims and Western nations.
“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad,” says Hamas in Article 13 of their Charter. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time.”
Hamas considers peace proposals ‘a waste of time’
And on that point, at least, Hamas is being refreshingly candid: peace proposals like Trump’s are, to them, “a waste of time.” Why pretend to accept Trump’s HISTORIC COMPLETE DISARMAMENT, then? Well, there is even a word in Islamic theology for what Hamas is doing: “taqiyya.” It is the practice of concealing the truth (Quran 16:106) from non-believers.
This latest peace deal, like all of Donald Trump’s previous peace deals, is a joke. It’ll be forgotten by this time next week.
– Kinsella is the author of bestselling Penguin Random House book The Hidden Hand: The Information War and the Rise of Antisemitic Propaganda