Hamas' upcoming manifesto, which won't have naked antisemitism, will not replace its Jew-hating charter

A month ago, the news came out that Hamas is working on a new charter that would eliminate its antisemitic parts, while still calling for the destruction of Israel:

A senior Hamas official said on Wednesday that the terror group, which rules the Gaza Strip, is rewriting its charter in a way that will remove its anti-Semitic language, but also made plain the group’s ongoing rejection of the Jews’ right to statehood in Israel.

The charter, written in 1988, contains a cocktail of Nazi, communist and Islamist anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, including that Jews were behind the French and Russian revolutions and the two world wars, that they control the media and the UN, that they infiltrated the Freemasons and that they funded colonialism with their wealth.

“We will have a clear political document, which is supposed to be in the near future, clarifying all those points,” the official, Osama Hamdan, told Al-Jazeera on Wednesday.

“You will find in this document clear words that we [sic] against the Zionists, against the occupation of our lands and we will resist the occupiers, whoever they were. And we are not against anyone regarding to this religion or to his race,” he said.

If you look at the Al Jazeera interview where these claims were made - in English - Hamdan never said that the charter would be replaced, but that there would be a new "political document." Hamdan is allowing the listener to assume that they are one and the same - but they are not.



In Arabic, senior Hamas leader Salah al Bardawil said explicitly "This new document of the Hamas organization will never be considered to constitute an alternative to  the organization's founding charter."

The media already got this wrong before the new manifesto is released. Get ready for more idiotic media claims that Hamas is "moderating" after it is released.

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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