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Thursday, April 08, 2010

Hamas troubles detailed in secret internal memo

The anti-Hamas Palestine Press Agency quotes an Algerian News Agency report on a letter sent to Khaled Meshal, Hamas' political leader in Damascus, from a Gaza Hamas committee, that reveals serious flaws and problems within the terrorist organization/pseudo government.

The memo warned of "tremors of violent internal organizational stability" within Hamas. It complains of a lack of "unity of intellectual and organizational discourse" between parts of Hamas as different Hamas leaders say different things to the media.It mentions a widening gap between Hamas' stated goals of resistance and its more recent policies to try to rein in rocket fire and other terrorist acts.

The document further calls Hamas' attempts at establishing relationships with Arab countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Yemen and the UAE a failure, as was its attempts to leverage its relationship with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah into leverage with Russia and Turkey. These failures are causing some in Hamas to question the wisdom of continued "resistance" even though no progress has been made on reconciliation or Gilad Shalit.

The Gaza public is also apparently losing confidence in Hamas, as the report warns that its early success of maintaining law and order has been disintegrating lately. In addition, Hamas' taxes and extortion has not improved the lot of average Gazans, causing increased displeasure with the Hamas government.

In addition, it warns of increased influence of the Salafist Islamist groups who are against Hamas from an ideological, religious viewpoint, causing the Islamist Hamas some discomfort as they have to defend their actions against those who are even more extreme.

Finally, the report mentions that the previous "blind obedience" that Hamas fighters had exhibited is disappearing. The report mentions some semi-autonomous Hamas gangs who are taking the law into their own hands.

The document gives a number of recommendations. A couple of them:

Concentrating the media discourse is much more important than the concessions we offer so as not to provoke the body [Israel] to attack us, particularly since the end of the resistance is for tactical reasons, to serve the big strategic goal to make Gaza a base for breakthroughs to restore the glories of the Caliphate. We must try to persuade the [other Islamic] factions of this tactic, so we cannot be accused of protecting the borders [on behalf of Israel.]

Beat with an iron hand all aspects of security chaos ...

We must eradicate the Salafi Jihad from Gaza, because the process of containment and reconciliation has failed. They are dangerous; a broad campaign to finish them, no matter how much blood, because silence means disaster the more time passes.
If this is legit, it means that the much maligned policy of containment is paying dividends - right at the time that the West is getting more uncomfortable with it.