This headline seems biased just by itself. “Bigwig” isn’t exactly a respectful term.
Would you use respectful terms for the leaders of a terrorist group?
I wouldn’t use disrespectful terms either, when you have a perfectly good neutral one right there: “leader”.
Or, alternatively, whatever their actual role in the organisation is. In this case, no current formal role, but he is the ex-chairman of Hamas.
Of course, the article would like to pretend he’s still a key figure so it can imply that he speaks for Hamas, but in reality he retired over a decade ago.
“Retired leader”. Yeah, the Times of Israel has always had an agenda, but they seemed to stick to an appearance of seriousness. It’s a bit disappointing to see them fall into silly name calling.
as i recall, the leadership of Israel has also ruled out an independent Palestinian state and a two-state solution, so i’m not sure why it’s news to the Times of Israel that Hamas doesn’t want one either. it’s clearly not advantageous to either party
And Hamas is not actually representative of Palestinians. The majority of people in Gaza are literally not even old enough to have voted last time there was any kind of election.
What Hamas actually is is a group that was funded and propped up by Netanyahu to create an intractable boogie man that Netanyahu could then point too and say “look, Palestinians don’t want a solution, nothing Israel can do about the situation, guess we have no choice but genocide.”
I’m not sure why this is regarded as an acceptable source at all, frankly.
Edit: for more detail, the founder of this paper is Seth Klarman, an American billionaire who also founded university campus initiatives that carry water for Israel and engage in anti-muslim and anti-Arab activities in the US. He’s also involved in blatant propaganda outfits like MEMRI, CAMERA, and Birthright.
for a variety of reasons:
- we don’t have a rule against what is effectively posting cringe and i am opposed to a rule of that sort on principle
- what is considered cringe is a completely subjective and arbitrary judgement that, if we made it a rule to not post cringe, would lead to a lot more bickering about sourcing. it’d also almost certainly make this place a lot less interesting, a lot more ideologically homogeneous, and a lot more prone to confirmation bias
- personally, i am just not all that interested in trying to parse “trustworthy” and “untrustworthy” sources beyond the absolute minimum “is this a crank blog or self promotion”, especially when media is not heterogeneously trustworthy on every possible issue. i don’t think most of our mod team is interested in trying to parse such a thing either
- we generally trust our userbase to be discerning
- we generally trust our userbase to be self-regulating etc.
And yet we’ll see which story gets more traction in the US press: this one about some random Hamas “bigwig” rejecting two state, or the one from yesterday about Netanyahu himself rejecting two-state.
“This just in! People actively in the process of being invaded and murdered reject calls for future peaceful coexistence with invaders who rejected the same calls!”
Actually… in its Declaration of Independence, Israel promised to uphold the UN resolution that would create two states… then merge them into one. They’re just skipping a step… 🙈
They were invaded on day one of their state’s existence. This kind of thing tends to throw a wrench into things.
They’ve also had 75 years since, to approve a Constitution… yet to this day, can’t agree on one.
That makes the Declaration of Independence the ruling text for the existence of Israel, and it still says what it says.
It’s kind oh hard to take two state solution seriously at this point given that current isreali leadership has shown such contempt for existing treaties
