{"id":182682,"date":"2015-07-02T17:52:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-02T22:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/02\/the-middle-east-is-fed-up-and-sh\/"},"modified":"2015-07-02T17:52:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-02T22:52:00","slug":"the-middle-east-is-fed-up-and-sh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/02\/the-middle-east-is-fed-up-and-sh\/","title":{"rendered":"The Middle East is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that ISIS is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/07\/01\/world\/isis-allies-target-hamas-and-energize-gaza-extremists.html\">threatening to make war on Hamas in Gaza<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>While it is clear that this is a bad thing for the ordinary folks, the complexity of the situation leaves me profoundly puzzled:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">One bomb hit a Hamas security checkpoint in northern Gaza. A few days later, another exploded in a trash can. Another blew up next to a Gaza City high-rise, and a small one targeted a chicken store owned by a Hamas intelligence official, Saber Siyam.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The four attacks in May \u2014 among at least a dozen this year, documented by a local human rights group \u2014 were aimed not at infidels, collaborators or criminals but at the ruling Islamist group, Hamas. The suspected perpetrators were Hamas\u2019s emerging rivals: extremist Islamist groups that see Hamas as insufficiently pious, and that vow loyalty to the Islamic State.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">While the extremists are unlikely to challenge Hamas\u2019s firm grip on the Gaza Strip in the foreseeable future, they complicate matters by occasionally shooting rockets into Israel that could touch off a wider conflagration, if the rockets kill or maim Israeli citizens.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">They could also seek to join forces with the far more dangerous, deadly branch of the Islamic State in neighboring Egypt\u2019s Sinai Desert, possibly derailing the slowly improving relations between Hamas and Egyptian authorities that have recently led to the Egypt-Gaza border crossing\u2019s being opened for brief moments for the first time in years.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWe will stay like a thorn in the throat of Hamas, and a thorn in the throat of Israel,\u201d said Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, the spokesman for the groups supporting the Islamic State, using a nom de guerre for security reasons.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Gaza has always had pockets of Islamists considered extreme even by the deeply conservative version of Islam practiced in much of the coastal enclave. Those extremists \u2014 known regionally as salafi-jihadis \u2014 have sparred with Hamas in the past, most notably in 2009 when a militant preacher declared an Islamic state from his mosque. More than 20 people were killed in the ensuing confrontation.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As near as I can figure, the net result of these developments is that Hamas and Iran are likely to join forces with Israel to fight ISIS.<\/p>\n<p>This is so screwed up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It appears that ISIS is threatening to make war on Hamas in Gaza. While it is clear that this is a bad thing for the ordinary folks, the complexity of the situation leaves me profoundly puzzled: One bomb hit a Hamas security checkpoint in northern Gaza. A few days later, another exploded in a trash &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1034,1159,986,1021,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran","category-israel","category-middle-east","category-religion","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}