Hamas held a meeting in the Gaza Strip several months ago with aides to President-elect Barack Obama, but the terror group was asked to keep the contacts secret until after last week’s elections, according to a senior Hamas official.
Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’ chief political adviser in Gaza, told the leading Al-Hayat Arabic-language newspaper Hamas has maintained regular communication with Obama aides that even continued during the past week.
“We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to come out with any statements, as they may have a negative effect on his election campaign and be used by Republican candidate John McCain (to attack Obama),” Yousuf told Al-Hayat.
Yousuf said Hamas’s contact with Obama’s advisers was ongoing, adding that relations were maintained after Obama’s electoral victory last Tuesday.
Apparently, we’re not supposed to care that the Obama campaign would engage in talks with terrorists…that’s guilt by association….or backwards thinking….or Islamophobic….or something.
Still, Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, told the Jerusalem Post, “This assertion is just plain false.”
So the question is, who do you believe? The Obama adviser, McDonough, or the Hamas adviser, Yousef? On the one hand we have the Rules For Radicals crowd practicing an ends justify the means mentality – ridicule, lie, cheat, disrupt, and use stealth to gain power, or we have the Islamic use of taqiyya, or deception, which is not only permitted, according to sharia law, but sometimes considered obligatory.
It’s a tough call, but I’m leaning toward Yousf’s side of the story, since Obama has already dispatched anti-Israel adviser, Robert Malley, who has a history with meeting with Hamas, to the Middle East:
Six months ago, Robert Malley, a Mideast expert described as an ancillary adviser to Obama, resigned amid a report in a London newspaper that he had contact with Hamas. According to some media reports, Malley is again representing Obama’s positions in meetings in Egypt and Syria, although it wasn’t immediately clear whether he was acting independently. FrontPageMagazine.com claims Malley was dispatched by Obama.
Remember this?:
In April, Yousef stated he hoped Obama would become president, comparing the Illinois senator to President John F. Kennedy.
“We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election,” Yousef told WND at the time.
“I hope Mr. Obama and the Democrats will change the political discourse. … I do believe [Obama] is like John Kennedy, a great man with a great principle. And he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community, but not with humiliation and arrogance,” Yousef said.
That endorsement is what inspired me to write an entire post about Obama’s troubling endorsements, and supporters throughout the world. At the time, I thought it was a devastating indictment of Obama’s wrong-headed and suicidal foreign policy ideas.
It turned out that a lot of people didn’t much care about that. Or they never knew.
Nice Deb 