Hamas Pushes Their Advantage

Noah Pollak that Hamas is now focusing on their greatest strength:

Hamas has lost — often badly — in every military theater it has fought in. Its suicide bombings have been thwarted by fences and walls, its rocket attacks, while a serious problem, do not cause many casualties and whenever Katyushas have been employed Hamas has suffered a stinging response from the IDF. So Hamas is now concentrating its efforts on fighting in the only theater in which it still enjoys superiority over Israel — in the media. Almost everything the terror group does today is oriented toward winning media coverage that condemns Israel and apologizes for Hamas.

Along those lines, Powerline quotes Dan Diker, Director of the Jerusalem based Institute for Contemporary Affairs, about the gains Hamas is making:

Reports in Israel today of U.S. pressure to button up a ceasefire with Hamas in advance of President Bush’s upcoming visit to Israel are worrying but not surprising.

...Most importantly, Hamas is interested in playing along with the idea of a ”calmer, gentler” Gaza at this moment to lend legitimacy to its aggressive and unprecedented play for international legitimacy as the one real Palestinian leadership that has already succeeded where U.S.-backed PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has not. Former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to the region last week and his meeting with Iran’s top Hamas agent Khaled Mashaal in Damascus were very helpful in legitimizing Hamas while politically undermining if not burying Abbas among Palestinians.

Now Hamas can say to the Palestinian public that it has a gained foothold of legitimacy even in the West while conceding nothing and has already established a sovereign Islamist emirate in Gaza that is not, from a Palestinian viewpoint, the vassal state of the U.S. and Israel that Abbas is negotiating with Olmert.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of Carter, at Hot Air Ed Morrisey notes an interview Jimmy Carter gives where he calmly mis-states the history of Hamas, claiming that the US and Israel never said that Hamas was a terrorist group until after they won the election.

Carter is nothing if not consistently off the mark.

Technorati Tag: Hamas and Jimmy Carter.