WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - National Security Matters: Hamas

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Ever since its Oct. 7 attack, Hamas has been cast in opposing lights by media: terrorist and freedom fighter.  Join Malia for a broad overview of Hamas by reviewing its founding charter and the 2017 revision.

Hello and welcome to National Security Matters, the show we discuss foreign policy, national security, the defense industry, and the organizations and individuals therein. I'm your host, Mali Tibido. Hamas was thrust into mainstream news after its October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Since then, conflicting narratives have emerged on its motivations. I want to give a glimpse into its values and goals by looking at and comparing its 1988 covenant with the 2017 revision. Harakat al-Mukwama al-Islamia, commonly known as Hamas, translates in English to the

Islamic resistance movement. It was formed as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood at the beginning of the First Intifada resistance war against Israel perpetuated by many Palestinian terrorist organizations in the late 1980s, early 1990s, by Sunni extremists, including Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Hassan Yusuf. On August 18, 1988, Hamas published the Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement. The 1988 version was updated in 2017 to reflect the new image Hamas was trying to project. There were a few key differences between them. One, the religious focus. For a religious extremist group whose founding documents is so entwined with its religious text, the Quran and Sunni scholars, the 2017 document seemed to retain surprisingly little of that same fervor.

The 1988 covenant, which was 36 articles long, cited the Quran liberally. It began with an invocation to their god Allah and sandwiches its ideological arguments in between different quotes. So I know I don't know enough about the Quran to say whether the verses are being taken out of context or not. By contrast, the 42 article-long 2017 document begin with a prayer to Allah but does not close with one nor does it reflect sandwich style previously used. The stated reason Hamas would not be associated with PLO was its secularism but you can see the 27 revision also adopts Western secular reasoning, namely humanitarian, democracy, and self-determination. Difference to land definitions

and peace negotiations. The 2017 revision actively defined the territory of Palestine as from the River Jordan to the east and to the Mediterranean in the west and from Rasa Nakhab in the north to Um al-Rashash in the south. Mosley's claim over all of Israel with this. Article 13 of the original charter says, quote, initiatives and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic resistance movement. Abusing any part of Palestine is abused directly against part of religion. End quote. The 2017 revision restates this, but in the next sentence it compromises.

Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital along the line of the 4th of June 1967 border to be a formula of national consensus, it says. With the previous idea that abuse of any part of the land of Palestine is an abuse to religion, this next sentiment can only be taken as a secular compromise. That means they're willing to give up their claim to the whole Israel land in favor for basically half of it. Difference three, position towards Jews and humanitarian framing. The 2017 revision goes out of its way to frame the organization as a resistance group only focused on reclaiming its land, not the fact that it's a terrorist group fighting against Jews and kidnapping civilians. It distances itself from the 1988 charter, which makes this outrageous claim in Article 22, which says they, Zionists, were behind World War I, then they were behind World War II,

then it says there's no more going on anywhere without having their finger in it, end quote. which I will point out is an absurdity of Jews being behind the Holocaust in many of the wars and conflicts over the years which have resulted in Jewish expulsions. In Section 16 of the revised Constitution, Hamas affirms that its fight is not with Jews, but those affiliated with, quote, the Zionist Project, which is not properly defined. On the anti-Semitic level, though, the 2017 version overtly denies Jerusalem as a holy land of the Jews and denounces the Judaism of the land. The Zionist project is not merely Israeli's implication, which leaves it up to very loose interpretation as to which Jews can be persecuted by Hamas. The large takeaway of this explanation is that the revision is deeply disguising Hamas's true aim behind a lot of humanitarian talk. It still retains its idea that peace can only come through jihad, which is violent Islamic conquest. This is just a kind of thing you get from the core documents of Hamas.

But if you look at the governing of Gaza, their actions during the first and second intifadas and their strategy in the most recent war, you can see how non-humanitarian, non-tolerant, Thomas is. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of National Security Matters with Malia Tibod. Next week, we'll do a profile of Steve Whitkoff, Trump's special envoy to the Middle East, who is currently negotiating peace in Russia for some reason.