Hamas doesn’t blow up churches

By Khalid Amayreh – On 26 October 1954, as the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser was giving a speech at the Manshiya Square in the coastal city of Alexandria, the Egyptian intelligence staged what looked like an assassination attempt on Nasser, apparently for the purpose of obtaining a pretext to crush the Muslim Brotherhood.

A disoriented young man named Mahmoud Abdel Latif squeezed through the crowd and fired eight shots toward the Egyptian leader, all of them missing.

Nasser, far from being disquieted by the incident, went on to finish his speech to the thunderous approval of his audience. The incident boosted Nasser’s popularity and provided the Egyptian autocrat and his military comrades with wide latitude to crush the Brotherhood.

In Cairo, activists and state-paid thugs, also known as Baltagiya, soon destroyed the Brotherhood’s headquarters, while near the Suez Canal, regime supporters sacked Brotherhood-affiliated businesses.

On 1 January 2011, twenty three people were killed and more than 90 were injured when terrorists believed to be secret state agents bombed the Saints Church, a Coptic church located across the street from the Sharq El-Madina mosque in Alexandria.

The attack was one of the deadliest acts of violence against Egypt’s Christian minority. It is widely believed that the Mubarak regime wanted to use the incident to terrorize Egyptian Christians into embracing his regime against the imagined Islamist enemy.

Similarly, the huge explosion at the Daqahlia Security Directorate in Mansoura on 24 December, which killed 16 and injured dozens, is likely to have been staged by the coup agents in order to use it as a pretext to gang up on the Muslim Brotherhood ahead of a referendum on the new Egyptian constitution which would replace the legitimate constitution approved by 63% of Egyptians.

Indeed, this is exactly what happened. The Sisi Junta used the incident to declare the MB a terrorist organization, although there was no shred of evidence corroborating charges to that effect.

Now, the murderous Junta’s Interior Minister, Muhammed Ibrahim is accusing Hamas not only of complicity in the Mansoura bombing, but is also claiming that he has information that Hamas, in concert with the MB, is planning to blow up churches in the Sinai Peninsula.

I hate to comment on remarks uttered by the scandalously dishonest and morally-bankrupt symbols of the bloody coup in Egypt. These people have proved themselves ad nauseam to be irredeemable liars. They just lie as often as they breathe the oxygen of life. They don’t hesitate to fornicate with simple truth and with language, taking advantage of a pathologically mendacious media that turns the black into white and the big lie into a “truth.”

Indeed, if these murderous thugs were living in a country that respects itself, they would have been made to stand before a firing squad a long time ago or at least dumped behind bars.

In fact, under different circumstances, I wouldn’t even bother responding to the pornographic lies of Egyptian officials. However, I’ve found this particular lie worth refuting and responding to since the matter touches on the Palestinian struggle.

Culture of lying

Unfortunately, Egypt is not a state that respects itself. It is a state that is based on lies, tyranny, and corruption. This explains the chronic failure of the Egyptian state ever since the toppling of King Farouk in 1952.

Well, there are a thousand reasons suggesting that the interior minister is lying.
Muhammad Ibrahim ordered the cold blooded killing of thousands of innocent Egyptians, claiming that the victims either killed themselves or were killed by their fellow protesters in order to besmirch the “glorious image” of the Egyptian security forces. Is a man with this sort of behavior qualified to tell the truth about anything…anything? Does he have any modicum of honesty?

Isn’t this the same minister who has failed to arrest, let alone prosecute a single perpetrator of those responsible for killing thousands of other Egyptians ever since the 25-January, 2011 revolution that toppled ex-president Mubarak?

As to Hamas, it is really hard to believe that Hamas which is struggling to survive an evil Israeli blockade would want to provoke the criminal coup-makers in Cairo.

In the final analysis, it is not in Hamas’s interests or the Palestinian people’s interests to interfere in Egypt or even provoke the hateful junta, especially at this time. More to the point, we all know that the Rafah border-crossing with Egypt is the Gaza Strip’s only “lung” to the outside world. Hence, any interference by Hamas in Egypt, especially conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood against a manifestly convulsive regime that is constantly on the edge, would be illogical, irrational and immensely irresponsible. It would be tantamount to committing political suicide on the part of the Palestinian Islamist liberation movement.

I am 99% convinced that the coup makers in Cairo know fully well that the Palestinians are totally innocent of the charges being leveled against them. Were not this the case, they would have produced a credible evidence incriminating Hamas.

The truth of the matter is that the coup-makers are having a big problem with their own people. They had the guts to overthrow the only democratically-elected president in Egypt’s entire history; they usurped the collective will of their own people, and didn’t hesitate to make the streets of Egypt flow with the people’s blood. And when it became evident that things didn’t go their way, the coup-makers lost their nerves and began throwing baseless and concocted charges right and left.

I am not a member of Hamas or the MB. But I can testify that from my personal and academic experience, Hamas is probably the cleanest and purest Arab and Islamic movement under the sun. Hamas’s battlefield is not Egypt, it is occupied Palestine.

It is enough for Hamas that the Islamic resistance group has been resisting Israeli aggression and Nazi-like criminality ever since its birth in 1987, whereas many Arab regimes, including Sisi’s Egypt, have been colluding and conniving with the murderous Zionist entity against the Palestinian cause. This fact alone should be sufficient to vindicate Hamas.