The celebratory shooting in the air in Gaza that followed the terrorist attack in Jerusalem last Friday showed that the ideology of HAMAS has a strong following. HAMAS is popular. I suspect that a majority of the population in Gaza favors them, although I do not know for certain. In any case, it is a significant percentage, if not an outright majority. (The election was overwhelmingly in favor of HAMAS, although the backing of any group can change over time.) This brought something back that I had forgotten about:
I remember this same response in that area when they obtained the news about the 9/11 attacks. If memory serves, this was an expression of similar widespread feeling throughout the Muslim world. This one incident cannot tell us much about the Muslim world’s feeling about what occurred in Israel Friday. However, the fact that Israel withdrew and this happened within a short period of time can give us a small indicator of what can possibly occur if and when the U.S. decides to withdraw it’s combat forces from Iraq. Different situation and scale, I know. However, the ideology is very similar, if not the same.
If anything can be gained from this incident, it is the knowledge that plenty of people in Gaza are supportive of this type of warfare.
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A good reference for opinion data is the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pcpsr.org/index.html