From the horse's mouth. An interview that CNN surprisingly broadcast on July 24.
In this video the son of one of the founders and leaders of Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef, enlightens the audience about the true aims of Hamas, which - sorry if this is a spoiler - have nothing to do with the protection of Palestinians, whether children or adults, or the fight to liberate them from Israel's "oppression".
Asked why he rejected the political and military objectives of Hamas, for whose leadership he had been groomed, he answered:
For the simple reasons that we see right now in Gaza, that Hamas does not care about the lives of Palestinians, does not care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don’t care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship.About "coexistence", he explained much more than I would have thought a mainstream media outlet like CNN could have taken:
Hamas is not seeking coexistence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and taking over. And by the way, the destruction of the state of Israel is not Hamas’ final destination. Hamas' final destination is building the Islamic caliphate, which means an Islamic state on the rubble of every other civilization.The interviewer Don Lemon then, after reminding Yousef that in his book he says that Hamas targets civilians as a tool of war, asks him to tell the audience about the Hamas he knows from growing up in the West Bank, to which Yousef replies:
In the mosques, Hamas taught us that without shedding innocent blood for the sake of the ideology, we wouldn’t be able to build an Islamic state. They were preparing us from the age as young as five years old. This is the ideology that Hamas was feeding us. And honestly it’s impossible almost for anybody to break through and see the truth and real face of Hamas and be able to leave at some point. As you see in my case, I had to lose everything just to say no to Hamas. And today when I look at the children of Gaza and I know what they’re fed, I know that they have no choice.Yousef converted to Christianity and is the New York Times bestselling author of the book Son of Hamas (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK) , his autobiography published in 2009.
H/t Benny Smith