US media is reporting that a Twitter campaign launched by Hamas to improve its image in the West seems to have backfired. According to an AP report, Twitter users have been mocking the campaign:
March 13, 2015 JERUSALEM (AP) — A Twitter hashtag campaign launched by Hamas on Friday to build support in the West seems to be backfiring with users mocking the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza.
Hamas launched (hashtag)AskHamas on Friday. The campaign promised responses from the group’s leaders, or as they called it, ‘Truth from the mouth of the horse.’
Some Twitter users swiftly responded with mockery.
One asked if a masked Hamas gunman was ‘single and ready to mingle.’
Some criticized Hamas for hiding weapons and fighters in civilian areas in its war last summer with Israel. One asked Hamas ‘how it chooses human shields.’
The Gaza war left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, the majority of them civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. officials. Israel says the number of Palestinian fighters killed was much higher and accuses Hamas of using civilians as human shields and storing weapons in schools and hiding gunmen in hospitals. On the Israeli side, 66 soldiers and six civilians were killed.
A Twitter user whose profile identified her as an Israeli diplomat asked: ‘Given a choice, is it better to hide a weapons cache in a hospital’s radiology or pediatrics unit?’
Another Tweeter asked: ‘Now serious question – looking back to summer 2014–was it worth it?’
Hamas said the hashtag campaign was launched so the militant group could express its views directly to the world. Bassem Naim, a Hamas official, said the campaign is ‘a step by Hamas to introduce it to the world in new languages, English, French and German, on the basis that the source is a direct Hamas official, not through mediators or translators.’
Read the rest here.
The Hamas charter says that it is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine.”
For more on Hamas, go here.