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Yes, plenty of other people perform indiscriminate attacks upon civilians, and many states, including in the west use arbitrary violence against other civilians or even their own. I’m sure people are aware that they are terrorists outside of Hamas.
You are right, plenty of people use the label to further their own goals and the ‘terrorist’ label is mostly used if not misused to discredit groups of people or political movements. Since it doesn’t really seem like the term is going to go anywhere soon, I think it is important to give a precise meaning to the term for this very reason.
Do we really need to mention every single act of terror committed by the Hamas or otherwise since the dawn of time? This is just shitty rhetoric, the same kind that Zionists use all the time.
But you do make some good points. Although I understand why you might have thought otherwise, I do think that Hamas needs to be portrayed fairly which indeed we haven’t done so far. Leaving it that way doesn’t do Palestinians, which overall greatly require our support and help, any good.
So for anyone else who would, per chance, stumble upon here, I’d like humbly submit my own personal presentation of Hamas, not-so-highly condensed for your own benefit:
The Hamas is a Palestinian political organization of Muslim-Brotherhood-inspired Islamic ideology. It was created in the Gaza strip in the late eighties during the first Intifada, a popular uprising against the Israeli occupation of their ancestral lands and the oppression the Palestinians have been facing ever since. Led by a physically disabled scholar, which up to this point had spend most of his time managing charities to help the dispossessed, the resistance movement created an armed wing to fight the State of Israel. Everyone knows of course, that the dismantling of the Zionist State was inscribed as a goal of Hamas in their first charter, but a less-well known fact is that, at the time, it was the official stance, and seemingly the majority view inside the movement, that civilians were not legitimate targets. (This didn’t stop civilian deaths during operations, people can argue if it was a bug or a feature but let’s move along).
This stance officially changed in the nineties, when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli civilian settler, opened fire inside a Hebron mosque, killing 29 people and injuring many more. In response to this, and also against the Oslo peace deal (to be fair it was a shitty deal for Palestinians), they started launching suicide bombings, largely targeting places where civilians gather like busses or busy streets, and this for many years. Along with plenty of other possibly more important reasons, like continued settlement expansion inside Palestinian territories, this culminated in the failure of the Oslo deals and the second Intifada, during which plenty of other legitimate or terror attacks where committed and directed by Hamas members (amongst many other acts of violence committed by Israel, Israeli settlers, or other Palestinian groups or individuals)
It took some time and a great deal of oppression but Israel succeeded in crushing the uprising but still withdrew from the Gaza strip in 2005, handing over control to the Palestinian Authority. Although I focused a lot on the armed conflict on the sole account that it is more eventful, it should be stressed that Hamas has continued to have large non-combating components, notably running charities filling the vacuum left by lack of proper state amenities and social services thus providing support to a significant part of the Palestinian population. They ended up coming first in elections in 2006, running on a platform against the rampant corruption in the Palestinian Authority controlled by the PLO. This caused Israeli and international outrage, things went sour. Hamas took control of the Gaza strip after some fighting against the PLO which they have administered ever since.
Hamas being largely considered at this point by the Israelis as a mortal enemy of Israel and of the Jewish people, Israel blockaded the Gaza strip in return. This didn’t stop sporadic acts of violence, like rockets fired at cities (although a lot if not most were fired by other militant groups) or operations against military targets, to which Israel responded with massive campaigns of destruction with immense death tolls. However, large periods of relative calm also occurred. During this period the Hamas made gestures of some significance towards Israel or peaceful resolution, like unilaterally declaring a long-term truce, attempting to prevent other groups to launch attacks, or stating rather clearly that they were ready to negotiate a long-term settlement with the Israeli State of the basis of the 1967 borders.
It could be quite easily argued that between 2005 and October 7, actual terror acts committed by Hamas were, relatively speaking and of course ignoring the suffering of their victims, quite insignificant compared to its history before 2005 or to its political power in the Gaza Strip or its large spread in Palestinian society. But it should not be ignored that by that point, the Israeli security apparatus, the Gaza blockade and the construction of the West-Bank wall had also made operations a lot more complicated to carry out. It should also be mentioned that Hamas has at times shown itself to be a force of oppression against the Palestinian people.
It seems rather well-established that the October 7 attack were planned to target civilians besides legitimate military targets.
It is important to stress that I focused here solely on Hamas, leaving out the greater context for the sake of brevity. Hamas has never existed or operated in a vacuum. Hamas is a late actor in a conflict that finds its roots over about 150 years ago when a bunch of Europeans Jews, in the face of rising antisemitism and partly inspired by other European nationalist and proto-fascist movements, decided it was a good idea to settle the land of Palestine to create a Jewish state, no matter if the people living there felt otherwise.
Anybody hell-bent of laying the blame on someone or a group needs to come to terms with the fact those truly responsible for the tragic mess that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and who are not all Jewish, Israeli, or even Palestinian, have all been dead for quite some time. Amongst the many of those who have decided since then to contribute to the problem rather than solve it, special mention should be made of Benjamin Netanyahu, a major player in Israeli politics for over thirty years, seventeen of which he was prime minister, and who largely contributed to the climate of hate inside Israeli society and, ultimately, the ongoing genocide. Speaking of which, intentions of genocide, or at the very least ethnic cleansing if you will, were quite clearly expressed by some of the most notable early Zionist leaders, and the Israeli settler movement has actively pursued this goal for decades.
I’m not going to contribute further to the discussion but please feel free to reply.
Before I respond to anything in this comment, I want to make a note about its nature and content.
It does not, in fact, address basically anything I said. Rather than address what I said, 90% of your comment is just an attempt to rehash pieces the history of “Israel” and Hamas, with some true elements, some misleading elements, and some outright false elements. It is unclear why you wrote most of it and its presentation is incoherent, without clear connection between paragraphs or points. It’s like you are summarizing bits and pieces of Wikipedia and injecting your own takes every so often.
Anyways. I will simply repeat myself where necessary, which is to say, repeat most of my previous comment in one way or another.
In my last comment, I took issue with your presentation of Hamas as terrorist. You claimed, “Using indiscriminate armed violence against civilians for political goals or under political pretenses is about the most reasonable definition of terrorism I can come up with.” and I responded to this with two paragraphs explaining how this is misleading at best and is itself deployed in a racist way via its inconsistent application. I made note of how it is used inconsistently repeatedly and challenged you to consider your own use of the term. In your reply, you did not engage with any of this. Instead, you wrote this:
This does not address what I said or how I challenged you. I did not ask “how is the term used?” I gave you plenty of direction: it is used inconsistently and in a racist manner. I asked you what function that serves. Is, “discredit” the entirety of your thought process for why a colonized people would be targeted with demonizing language applied inconsistently? You should spend more time thinking about it. I’m not exactly being subtle, here.
Re: precision, that is actually what I am pointing out to you. The term is not applied consistently, i.e. it has more meaning than what you might go and try to look up in a dictionary. You are actually being less precise, using a false facade of semantics, missing the actual semantics going on here. And still trying to push back despite conciliatory language.
I next responded to your boorish claims about Hamas doing lots and lots of terrorism, saying: “Such as? How does this compare to “Israel”? The surrounding comprador states? The US? Canada? Do you apply this logic and labeling frequency consistently or as suggested by dominant propaganda?”
The entirety of your response to that appears to be:
This is childish behavior. You claimed, “Hamas have carried far too many terrorist attacks over a far too long period for us to have any doubts that they are indeed ‘terroristic’ as our friend put it”. (PS this chauvinist is not my friend). I asked you to back up your false claim (because we both know you can’t) with examples and to critically examine what you are saying by comparison to relevant countries, including the occupying power and its imperial backer. Rather than do so, you are pretending I have asked the world of you, to name every single “terrorist attack” (you named zero). This is dishonest and bad faith behavior and unless you are literally a child you should know better.
Answer the question or just be honest that you can’t.
I then challenged you to contextualize this in terms of settler colonial genocide, of which there are many precedents following similar models, also with the same kinds of backers from what is now the OECD. The absurdity would be clear if you were honest about this and actually tried to answer. I stated, “When First Nations fought against settlers, were they terrorists and similarly illegitimate? What would you think of someone who watched their genocide and spent their focus on villifying militant groups and alleged specific acts with racialized language while using no such emphasis for the much greater volume of such violence to enact genocide? Many indigenous groups have recognized the need to oppose settlers themselves and settlerdom, the people who stole their and their parents’ land and houses and killed their relatives. You simply dismiss such people as terrorists? Without chauvinist glasses of the oppressor you would probably call them freedom fighters.”
You simply ignored this in its entirety.
The rest of my comment was similarly ignored. Repeating it,
Instead, you populated the rest of your response with an uninvited and, as stated before, problematic attempt to summarize Hamas. The point of doing so is not clear. You explicitly say what you claim it to be, i.e.,
You might have noticed that I don’t require nor did I ask for a meandering and confused history lesson. I am not bumbling around here like you are, throwing around settler language and dancing around questions and challenges. I have been quite direct and plain in what I am saying and you are avoiding it, which I suppose is an admission in its own way that you are not up to the task of honestly responding.
Because you have dumped a confused and meandering history lesson and then immediately ran away, there isn’t much reason to go through it point by point and it would take up way too much space. I will poke at a couple things stated just because I can, but if anyone is particularly enamored with any sections I would be happy to tear through them. Feel free to ask. I do want to again emphasize how strangely written this is, making allusions to people you could simply name and making seemingly disconnected points that jump around in time.
I will note that you do not actually go over how this is terrorism, but leave it implied by the form of resistance, relying on the audience’s familiarity with islamophobic tropes. I invite you to list the bombings, their targets, and their locations. Re: location, here is a hint: they are nearly all in the West Bank, i.e. demarcated Palestinian territory. You may wish to ask yourself why, say, blowing up a military vehicle (like in Mehola Junction) is not a direct act of resistance against oppressing occupiers and not terrorism. You may wish to ask yourself how much you have internalized islamophobia by the form of weapon used. The occupiers use planes, missiles, and tanks, and kill in far greater volumes, and target civilians to a staggeringly greater degree. I challenge you to, again, go through your own references to “Israel” and ask whether you always call it, “the illegitimate terrorist so-called state of ‘Israel’”, as your knee-jerk response to Hamas is to go into such invective.
Such as? I’ve already asked you to back up your claim that they have committed, “so many” that it justifies saying Hamas, “have carried far too many terrorist attacks over a far too long period for us to have any doubts that they are indeed ‘terroristic’ as our friend put it”
“Israelis” already considered all Palestinians to be such, particularly any that formed any kind of militant resistance to genocidal settler colonial occupation and oppression. They are extraordinarily racist, as in old-timey racist (because they are settlers), and they conflate Judaism with their own violent and horrific projects - itself one of the most antisemitic programs in existence. Your claim here was simply left to fester, unchallenged. Oh good, the “Israeli” settler point of view. Funny how others are not given the same weight.
Is it in return? Or was it simply another excuse to escalate and oppress, same as the status quo for decades?
Anyways, I’m out of space.