Yehudit Barsky, has an excellent monograph on the Hamas terrorist group.

Barsky is the Director of the Division on Middle East and International Terrorism at the American Jewish Committee.

You can read Barsky’s work on Hamas here:

Hamas – The Islamic Resistance Movement in Palestine – Yehudit Barsky

Mahmoud Zahar a/k/a al-Zahar, a Hamas terror hardliner and “the real power behind the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh,” claimed today that his terrorist group’s rocket attacks on Israel are not a problem.

Zahar readily admits to smuggling $42 million U.S. dollars in cash into Gaza for Hamas, telling Der Spiegel: “I personally once brought $20 million from Iran to the Gaza Strip in a suitcase. No, actually twice — the second time it was $22 million.”

Sunday Times reporter Christine Toomey, suggests that Zahar should not be taken at his word. When she wrote an investigative piece trying to figure out what happened to captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the right-hand man to Hamas’ Ismail Haniyah gave her this cagey response:

“Nobody from the political or military wing of Hamas knows where Shalit is,” he says, disingenuously, sitting by my side in a starched safari suit. “Only the small group who kidnapped him know. They are very secretive.”

In a 2006 interview with another Sunday Times reporter, Zahar vowed that Hamas didn’t have to give up weapons for peace. “Why, why do we have to give up our weapons?” When asked how Hamas would make internal political decisions if it assumed power in Gaza, Zahar retorted: “”Why are you interested in that? We have no problems. We are not using guns to choose our representatives. We are not using guns in the primaries. We use knives.” And he refused to answer journalist Stephen Farrell’s question on whether Hamas “moved from being the IRA to being Sinn Fein”, laughing instead.

Zahar believes that “Christian Zionism” (i.e., Christians who support Israel) is “criminal.”

Zahar openly vows never to recognize Israel’s existence: “Israel is not a legitimate entitity, and no amount of pressure can force us to recognize its right to exist.”

In the calculated cruelty that is Hamas, the English-language web site operated by the radical Islamic terrorist group’s “military arm” set up a horrific poll concerning the fate of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.


Using web-savvy marketing tactics — replete with English typos — Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades put a poll on their website asking visitors to guess the fate of Gilad Shalit, more than two years after he was kidnapped from inside Israel by Palestinian terrorists and brought back to Gaza.

The poll asks users to vote on what the “Faith [sic] of Shalit will be”:

The terrorist minds inside Hamas show their true colors, asking whether Shalit’s fate will be like Ron Arad, whether he will be part of a successful prisoner swap, or whether he will die.

The fact that Hamas appears to have posted this sick poll just after Sunday Times reporter Christine Toomey’s account investigating Gilad Shalit’s well-being and whereabouts in Gaza seems less than coincidental.

Toomey spoke with Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas co-founder and right-hand man to Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza; and Ahmed Yousef, another Hamas top political advisor; and to an unnamed member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing, suggests that Hamas opted to continue it’s disgusting position of playing games with Gilad Shalit’s family, the Israeli public, and all those who oppose terror.

Retired U.S. diplomats who are member of a vehemently anti-Israel lobbying group on Washington, D.C. met with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya in the Gaza Strip today.


The anti-Israel lobby, Council for the National Interest (CNI), included Richard Viets, a retired former number two U.S. diplomat in Israel in its contingent. Viets was also U.S. ambassador to Jordan in the early 1980s.

The ‘meeting’ is nothing more than a public relations stint by Hamas’ Haniyah, a man who once called a Hamas suicide attack that killed 9 civilians in Tel Aviv “an act of self-defense.”

Did the INC tell Hamas to free Israel’s Gilad Shalit, the kidnapped Israel soldier who was taken by Hamas while on guard duty inside Israel? Did it denounce Hamas’ terror, weapons, and financial ties to Iran?

Don’t bet on it. Viets was quoted as saying that the anti-Israel group went to Gaza to “educat[e] ourselves better about the situation here in order to return home and to explain to our countrymen the reaction and the views of what we heard.” In other words, to act as P.R. spokesmen for a group which has remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups for years.