Palestinian journalist Zaki Chehab's Inside Hamas is reviewed in a New York Review of Books piece that covers three books about Hamas (the other two are Kill Khalid, by Paul McGeough, and Hamas in Politics, by Jeroen Gunning).
Excerpt:
Although Hamas itself is not yet a quarter-century old, it is important
to recall that the earliest armed resistance to Zionist colonization
was not nationalist, but rather pan-Islamist in inspiration. In his
gossip- and fact-packed book Inside Hamas, Zaki Chehab, a
pro-Fatah Palestinian journalist, reminds us that the namesake of
Hamas's Qassam Brigades was, in fact, a Syrian who was educated at
Cairo's al-Azhar University. When France occupied Syria in 1920,
Ezzedine Qassam briefly led an armed cell, but soon fled to the safety
of British-occupied Palestine. As a mosque preacher in Haifa he
witnessed the surge in Jewish immigration that followed Hitler's rise,
and began a clandestine campaign to arm Muslim fighters.
Watch Zaki Chehab interviewed by Jon Stewart for The Daily Show.
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31 Oct 2009 6:27 AM
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