UN Relief Chief Martin Griffiths told said on Wednesday that he did not consider Hamas to be a terrorist group.
A Sky News interviewer asked him about the difficulty of eliminating Hamas, and Griffiths responded “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, as you know, it is a political movement."
That hardly exonerates him, since he didn't only exclude Hamas as a terrorist group, but he also said it was a "political movement."
But it is worth examining the UN Security Council list of designated terrorist groups, because it is not meant to be a list of terrorist groups worldwide.
The list started as a list of groups to be sanctioned under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 which was specifically against Al Qaeda and later expanded to the Taliban and ISIS. The name of the the list is the "ISIL (Da'esh) & Al-Qaida Sanctions List."
The UN Security Council does not claim to have a list of designated terror organizations. It has a list of terror organizations associated with ISIS and Al Qaeda, nothing more. (There is also a separate list of entities and people under sanctions for various reasons, but it is not referred to as a terrorist list.)
So Griffiths is being knowingly deceptive about even this.
Of course, the UN would never designate Hamas or Islamic Jihad as terrorist organizations, because the Arab bloc and other non-aligned nations would oppose it. So using the UN as a yardstick to determine whether Hamas is a terror group is absurd. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are designated terror groups by the EU, US, UK and others.
