Islamist Camp Ramah? The Guardian imagines a kinder, gentler Hamas

Hamas is not only recognized by the West as a terror group due to its long history of lethal attacks against Israeli civilians, but is an antisemitic movement so extreme that their founding charter openly incites its members to murder Jews – not merely Israelis, but ‘Jews’. Further, as anyone who spent any time at the site Palestinian Media Watch would surely know, they’re in a class of their own when it comes to educating their children on the sublime virtues of jihad.
However, save one mild report by Harriet Sherwood last year, the Guardian has all but ignored Hamas’s disturbing indoctrination of Gaza’s youth, and indeed often attempts – through misleading photos and other forms of obfuscation – to portray a kinder, gentler side of the Islamist extremist group.
A good illustration of the Guardian’s habit of engaging in such propaganda was evident in the photo used to illustrate a report today (June 3) by Peter Beaumont titled ‘Israel condemns US for backing Palestinian unity government‘.

Their decision to illustrate the story with a photo of Palestinian children innocently frolicking at a Hamas summer camp would lead the causal reader to assume the benign nature of the Hamas summer experience (a Palestinian version, it seems, of Camp Ramah). Of course, this assumption would be ‘slightly’ undermined if Guardian readers were to view photos showing other camp activities.

Thousands of Gaza’s children enroll in Hamas sponsored camps each summer – camps which aim to instill Hamas’s “fundamentalist brand of educational and nationalist ethos in the youth of Gaza” and to indoctrinate the youth to “return to occupied Palestine.”
Camps reportedly include the use of live ammunition and simulated kidnappings of Israeli soldiers.
However, thanks to the Guardian, we now know that – interspersed with such paramilitary activities – there’s evidently still time for future Palestinian jihadists to blow bubbles.