French media is reporting that in a Friday sermon, the Hamas Prime Minister in Gaza appealed for “faith in the Arab Spring” despite the overthrow of former Egyptian President Morsi. According to an AFP report:
Ismail Haniyeh
July 05, 2013 AFP Ismail Haniya, head of the Hamas government in Gaza, appealed in a Friday sermon to have faith in the Arab Spring despite the ouster of Egypt’s Islamist president Mohamed Morsi by the army.
‘Do not fear for the Palestinian cause or for the resistance (against Israel) or for Gaza. Egypt is behind us, as are the Arab and Islamic countries,’ Haniya said.
‘We believe good will emerge from this Arab Spring, these revolutions and this rebirth. We expect the Arab Spring cycle to continue until its objectives are attained, including our own cause.’
Haniya’s political adviser Yussef Rizq on Thursday criticised on his Facebook page the ouster of Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president.
‘What happened in Egypt, his eviction and removal of power, is not part of a genuine democratic process, because they used military force and not the voice of the people through elections,’ Rizq said.
Hamas has not officially reacted to Morsi’s removal whose election it feted in June 2012 as he hails from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Palestinian Islamist movement is affiliated.
Under Morsi, as well as former Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, Egypt promoted reconciliation efforts between Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas’s Fatah movement which governs the West Bank and Hamas which rules the Gaza Strip.”
Posts from May reported on the visit by Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi to Gaza where he was greeted by Prime Minister Haniyeh and where Qaradawi took the occasion to call for “Death by Jihad” for Israel.
The Hamascharter says that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine” and soon after Hamas took over the Gaza strip, Muslim Brotherhood representatives traveled to Gaza from Egypt through the newly-opened border to review Hamas military formations. A Hamas journalist has acknowledged the role that the “international Muslim Brotherhood” has played in providing funds for the purchase of weapons and Hamas is known to be supported financially and politically by the global Muslim Brotherhood. A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman revealed that a coalition of London-based Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, were behind the mass demonstrations staged to protest Israeli actions in the 2008 Gaza war and the Global Muslim Brotherhood and its Turkish affiliates were also intimately involved, along with the Turkish government, in the June 2010 Gaza flotilla that was involved in a violent altercation with Israeli naval forces.
