Hamas' "moderation" in interview gets jeers from Arab media

You know how Arab leaders speak completely differently to Western reporters and to their own people? We've seen it hundreds of times. The relatively few times their duplicity gets revealed in Western media, there is a small kerfuffle and then things quickly go back to normal.

Well, there is a flip side. How to die-hard Jew-haters respond when a Hamas leader speaks in peaceful terms to a Western reporter - and the interview gets translated to Arabic?

The result tells us a lot about the Middle East.

Arab newspaper Vetogate is now publicizing an interview, seemingly from 2009, with Hamas "political wing" leader Ismail Haniyeh. The reporter asks Haniyeh what he would do if his child would announce that he wants to be a suicide bomber, and Haniyeh tries to brush off the question by claiming (incredibly) that Hamas doesn't support suicide bombing.



His faux-humanitarian responses might work for wishful-thinking Westerners, but Vetogate is reporting it as saying "Haniyeh values the blood of Jews - and won't allow his sons to go on martyrdom operations."

So just like it is newsworthy when Arab leaders are discovered to be more violent than they pretend to be in the West, it is newsworthy for Arab media to notice that violent Arabs pretend to be less violent than they really are.

Because it makes them look soft.

The point isn't that Haniyeh is a hypocrite who takes advantage of Western gullibility - that is a given. The point is that even pretending to be a moderate makes one lose credibility in much of the Arab world.

Not that this is new. Fatah has often lampooned Hamas for not being as tough has they pretend to be - attacking them from the more extreme position.

This is how the Arab world works - rarely can one find an Arab media outlet that argues that a group is too harsh in its position on Jews or Israel. I don't recall ever seeing that - not in an op-ed, not in a comment, nothing. The groupthink in the Arab world is uniformly set up that everyone tries to outdo the next in their hate of Jews and Israel.

But Western politicians and journalists simply cannot see it.