During a recent televised debate, a French-Moroccan Imam lashed out at Hamas for using civilians as human shields. The Imam, Rachid Birbach, said that Gazans were “caught between a rock and a hard place” and that Hamas “has been using them as human shields.”
Via Israel National News:
MEMRI posted the transcript:
Rachid Birbach: We are talking about human rights and about the killing of 600 Palestinians. This is the reason that people [in France] are demonstrating…
TV host: By now, it is 700 Palestinians.
Rachid Birbach: Well, how many millions of Muslims died in the Central African Republic? How many died in Burma? Why don’t we see human rights groups take to the streets of Paris to protest this…?
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I cry my heart out at night over the [plight] of the Palestinians, but unlike those who say that this is an Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I say that it is a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We must understand this.
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I don’t understand why Hamas opposes peace in such an insane manner. They reject this. When Egyptian diplomacy intervened and proposed a ceasefire, Hamas rejected it.
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I’d like to make myself clear: I support Gaza and Palestine. I am against oppression. The Palestinian people are caught between a rock and a hard place: between the Israeli bombardments, on the one hand, and the abuse and siege by Hamas, on the other hand – and the latter is even more terrible. Hamas has been using them as human shields.
More… A captured Hamas manual in Gaza explains the benefits of using civilians as human shields.