West Misses al-Zawahiri's Key Point: Hamas Insufficiently Islamist for al-Qaeda

Watching not just the PBS Newshour, but also the usually more astute BBC, and even reading the NYTimes piece on it,

you would think that the main thrust of the latest video from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama's #2 guy in al-Qaeda, was to let the American people know that Bush doesn't know what he's doing in Iraq -- as if we needed him to tell us that ...

But, while the surprisingly short NYTimes piece mentioned it in passing, both PBS and the BBC seem to have missed completely the key message of the video:

namely, that al-Qaeda considers Hamas insufficiently Islamist ...

first and foremost, for participating in an election, rather than jihad, as he put it;

then for going along with the famous "Prisoner's Agreement", put together by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails as a basis for moving forward, and

then for agreeing to even think about participating in a unity government with President Mahmoud Abbas, who Ayman characterized as "America's man in Palestine."

The al-Qaeda critique of Hamas -- which has been delivered previously -- is important at this particular moment for three reasons:

1) It shows once again the simplistic and reductionist character of US discourse and "understanding" about the complex relationships among groups stupidly lumped together as "terrorist" ...

Indeed, this is disturbingly reminiscent of American refusal during the Cold War to "believe" there was a major split between the Soviet Union and China --

a willful ignorance that had several deleterious effects for the US itself, notably -- but not exclusively -- as a rationale for the self / destructive intervention in Vietnam ...

2) While there has been considerable bad blood between Sunni and Shiite branches of political Islam -- Iran, for example, not only condemned 9/11 unreservedly, but actively supported the overthrow of the deeply anti-Shiite Taliban --

it is much rarer to hear jihadi criticism of Sunni political Islam ... especially in its Palestinian incarnation ...

3) Finally, coming as it does in the midst of internal Palestinian turmoil that could, frighteningly, be a prelude to civil war there,

it reveals the extent to which the Palestine situation has little human reality for al-Qaeda and any other jihadi groups,

but is simply a convenient symbol for them of what they see as the general oppression of the Islamic world by the West ...

Even Ahmadinejad says that if the Palestinians are happy with a deal with Israel -- which he has made clear he thinks should be completely destroyed -- then he's not going to second- guess them ...

But apparently, that's not good enough for al-Zawahiri ...

And THAT is the key point about his latest video -- that it makes unmistakably clear the fundamental differences among groups that Americans -- at both the popular and elite levels -- wrongly lump together under the already-inappropriate rubric of "terrorists" ...