Thursday, August 20, 2009

Hamas Trains New Generation of Teenage Terrorists


Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
A7 News

Hamas is training a new generation of terrorists in Gaza, where 50 percent of the population is under the age of 18, according to the French news agency AFP. The news agency reported that young teenagers lie on beds of nails while two other boys stand on their chests, prompting a nine-year-old to say, "No one will be able to mess with us after we become kung fu masters. Everyone will be afraid of us."Hamas has been training teenage terrorists for years, and its terrorist leaders previously have been photographed training children at “summer camps” on the ruins of Jewish communities destroyed after the Israeli government’s expulsion of Gaza’s Jewish residents four years ago.

Psychologist Samir Zaqut told AFP that although the “sport” activities help children release their tensions, they also can promote violence.

Many of the children explained their desire to become terrorists as a response to the Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist offensive earlier this year, but Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University said it is a part of a more extreme element.

“New groups of young people, they are fed up with what they see as Hamas' betrayal of the cause – of Islamic ideology and of jihad," Dr. Kedar told the Christian Science Monitor. "They view Hamas as having become too bureaucratic, too moderate, and they want action."

Last week, Hamas battled an al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist cell in Rafiah for two days, leaving a death toll of at least 24, including the Soldier of God leader Sheikh Abdel Latif Moussa. He had declared Gaza an Islamic emirate.

The growth of groups even more extremist than Hamas has been traced to poverty and pessimism, which has grown significantly since the Second Intifada, also known as the Oslo War, broke out nine years ago next month. Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel, and its failure to improve social and economic conditions has encouraged many youth to seek groups such as Al-Qaeda, which wants a pan-Islamic empire.

"Since the Hamas takeover, you're talking about two years of devastated economy in Gaza, a population that has no way of getting in or out, and almost a decade of humanitarian problems," Nathan Brown, a senior associate and expert on Palestinian politics at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told the Monitor. "I can't believe that this type of abnormal situation wouldn't have effects that would send young Palestinians to these types of movements.

“Any government involved in violence of this scale is running a great risk there will be substantial backlash."

One of Hamas’s biggest threats is a union of its enemies, such as the Army of Islam, which helped engineer the terrorist attack that ended with the kidnapping of soldier Gilad Shalit. Brown said that the ultra-extremists compare Hamas with Fatah when it was in power, before Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza in 2007.

They see the local authority as more interested in reaming in power and trying to keep maintain calm with Israel at the cost of carrying out the ideology of terrorist attacks against Israel.

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