The morning’s email roundup from Mosaic directs attention to the video jointly produced by the Center for Peace Communications/Free Press (Free Press story here, behind the FP paywall). The video depicts Al Jazeera at work. Mosaic provides this background:
Because Hamas cannot overpower the IDF on the battlefield, it counts on inciting global hostility to Israel until international pressure forces Israel to stop fighting. This strategy depends both on distributing its own propaganda, and suppressing any information that it doesn’t want to be known outside of Gaza. For both purposes, it relies heavily on Al Jazeera, the media arm of Qatar, which is also Hamas’s patron.
As one of the interviewees in this video from the Center for Peace Communications explains, “the majority of the Al Jazeera staff [in Gaza] are an inseparable part of Hamas.” The network’s employees also play an important role in helping Hamas identify any journalists working for media not under its control—as well as dissidents more broadly—whom the terrorists then arrest and torture. On Al Jazeera’s team of propagandists-cum-agents was the late Anas al-Sharif, who shared a Pulitzer Prize and was widely mourned in the Western media after his death at the hands of the IDF. At the head of these information operations stood Abu Obeida, killed in an IDF airstrike last week.
Mosaic then quotes Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who describes himself on his X account as “[p]roud American; Gaza native; pro-Palestine, pro-Peace, anti-Hamas & milit-occupation, Head of @rfpalestine; Senior Fellow @AtlanticCouncil; Term Member @CFR_org.” He describes the importance of Abu Obeida to Hamas (emphasis in original):
I don’t think most Western audiences and policy commentators are aware of the blow that Hamas just experienced with the elimination of its most public figurehead, Abu Obeida, a super-hero-like personality who enjoyed global recognition not unlike historical “resistance” figures. For nearly two decades, this masked man became the face of Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, whose words were broadcast to hundreds of millions on Al Jazeera and later on throughout social media, delivering Hamas’s jihadist propaganda and the armed-resistance narrative to vast Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and global audiences.
His words were treated as gospel, the ultimate truth; Abu Obeida supposedly never lied to the hordes of Hamas supporters. . . . His likability was greater than that of all Hamas’s political and military leaders combined, with many being brainwashed into Hamas’s propaganda thanks to the charismatic and compellingly confident manner in which Abu Obeida spoke.
Interestingly, some associated Hamas’s ability to rebuild itself after the current war with the survival of Abu Obeida. . . . Indeed, the elimination of Abu Obeida should be treated as the opening chapter in Hamas’s final stand in Gaza City as a cohesive fighting force that has a unified narrative and ability to create psychological appeal to global masses and audiences of the terror organization.
Let it be.
The quote is taken from Alkhatib’s X tweet posted here. The video is below.
