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NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004Our Life and Times by Kevin A. BarrySharon's terrorismOn March 22, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the radical Islamist Hamas movement. It did so with a U.S.-supplied missile shot from a helicopter. Virtually every world leader except George Bush and John Kerry has condemned this cowardly attack on a 67-year-old wheelchair-bound religious leader. Some 200,000 Palestinians filled the streets of the Gaza Strip to mourn Yassin. They also vowed vengeance, with some saying that "the gates of hell" would now open up. It is certainly true that Hamas is a terrorist movement that has orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians through suicide bombings. It is certainly true that such actions are crimes against humanity. It is also true that Hamas is an anti-Semitic fundamentalist movement that calls for an authoritarian Islamic state in the whole of what is today Israel and Palestine. But it is equally true that Yassin headed the political rather than the military wing of Hamas; that he had agreed to a long truce last year, which broke down because Sharon insisted on continuing his assassinations of Palestinian leaders during the truce. Why, if Sharon had any other goal than provoking more violence to justify his own violence and walling in of the Palestinian people, did he not arrest Yassin? |
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