Hamas leader Zahar gets Egyptian citizenship!

Palestine Today reports that Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza, admits that he applied for and received Egyptian citizenship and an Egyptian passport last September.

That's when Egypt first started allowing those with Egyptian mothers to apply to become Egyptian nationals.

He told BBC Arabic that this was his right, and he also intended to exercise his right to vote for an Islamist candidate in Egypt's presidential elections.

As I have reported, tens of thousands of Gazans applied  for Egyptian citizenship after the 2004 law that allowed those with Egyptian mothers to become citizens started being enforced last year. A coupleof thousand have been accepted as Egyptians.

Arab leaders, and credulous Western experts, have claimed for decades that Palestinian Arabs would refuse to become citizens of Arab countries and their Palestinian Arab leaders insist that they must remain stateless in order to keep the Palestinian Arab cause alive.  But when they have a chance to become citizens elsewhere, they always  jump at the opportunity.

One of the biggest human rights abuses in the world today is the refusal of most Arab countries to naturalize their Palestinian residents, even though they have laws to allow other non-Palestinian Arabs to become citizens. Rather than fight against this - which violates the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and the Convention on the Rights of the Child - human rights organizations actually support keeping Palestinian Arabs stateless - against their will.

It is just another example of the hypocrisy of those who are pretending to fight for the rights of Palestinians.