Foreign secretary’s call comes after group releases video of British-Israeli hostage it says died after being wounded in Israeli airstrike

David Cameron has urged the BBC to describe Hamas as a terrorist organisation, reviving an accusation that the corporation shies away from a valid description of the Islamist group that is holding Israeli hostages.

The UK foreign secretary told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the organisation should reconsider its guidelines in light of a video released by Hamas showing the British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell, who the group said had died in Gaza.

Hamas released a statement on Saturday saying the 51-year-old had died after being wounded in an Israeli airstrike a month ago. The video showed him with a black eye.

      • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        2 months ago

        My definition of terrorist tactics is irrelevant to how the OP would classify Hamas.

        Regardless, here’s how terrorism is defined on Wikipedia: it seems pretty reasonable to me.

        Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants

    • psvrh@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 months ago

      I’ll put this back to you this way: is Likud also a terrorist organization? Is the IDF? Because they do a lot of the same stuff.

      There are definitely terrorists associated with Hamas, and Hamas definitely carries water for them, but they’re also the duly elected government in Gaza and if I were Israel I’d be asking why Gazans feel like they were so wronged that the only option seems to be a political movement that’s sympathetic to terrorist tactics.

      Saying “they’re terrorists” without acknowledging how we got here is a lot like calling the ANC in South Africa “terrorist” in the 1980s. It’s stupidly reductionist and ignores complexity for the sake of jingoism.

      It’s also why Cameron is a disingenuous jackass.