Hamas’s deception—and our self-deception

Last Sunday, senior Hamas terrorist Ali Baraka told the tale of how Hamas duped Israel and the U.S. into complacency.

In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today), Baraka said, “In the past couple of years, Hamas has adopted a ‘rational’ approach. It did not go into any war and did not join Islamic Jihad in its recent battle, [i.e., its missile assault on Israel in August 2022].

“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”

In other words, Hamas pretended it was a credible partner for negotiations, and that the only problem was Palestinian Islamic Jihad, its Iranian-founded spin-off.

One of the frustrating aspects of Baraka’s admission is that there was nothing new about Hamas’s deception. Deception is an integral part of the jihadist doctrine, going back to the days of Muhammad. Just as important, and frustratingly, even those who are unaware of—or willfully blind to—the centrality of Islamic jihadist doctrine and beliefs for Hamas, should still have been familiar with Hamas’s tactic.

It comes right out of the PLO’s playbook.

Five days after Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,300 Jews in southern Israel, and on the eve of his meeting Friday in Amman with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, P.A. chairman and PLO/Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas released a statement.

“We reject the practices of killing civilians or abusing them on both sides because they contravene morals, religion and international law.”

Abbas’s statement is notable for many reasons. It doesn’t name Hamas. It draws a moral equivalence between Israel’s counterattack in Gaza and Hamas’s orgiastic rape, torture, murder, immolation and kidnapping of babies, children, women and men. And it came after five days in which Abbas and the rest of Palestinian society did nothing but celebrate and defend Hamas’s atrocities while blaming Israel for the crimes against humanity Hamas conducted against its people.

In his speech on Oct. 10, President Joe Biden intimated that Hamas isn’t representative of the aspirations of the Palestinians. In his words, “Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right to dignity and self-determination.”

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