As you always say, you "expect crickets", but considering that nobody contributing to this group supports Hamas' agenda, esp. the supra-Islamist agenda and that agenda w.r.t. women's rights, what do you expect contributors to this group to say?
Surely you can't expect someone who cares about the rights of Palestinians to assert that the religious backwardness of Hamas excuses and justifies Israel's occupation? Or that this somehow "proves" that Palestinians are inferiors with an inferior culture and who can't be trusted to rule themselves, so the Israeli occupation somehow saves these inferior beings from themselves? Or are you trying to say that the injustices done to them by Israel are trifling in comparison to what they do to themselves, so the injustices of the occupation can rightly be overlooked?
When the US destroyed the physical and social infrastructure of Iraq, the only thing that Iraqis had to turn to was their religion. Their religious organization and the hope that their religion gives them. This in turn was exploited by forces bent on causing a civil war, a hot war between Islamic sects. A lot of info is still coming out about this - e.g. the recent guardian report on the monstrous actions of Col. Michael Steele and Gen. David Petraeus
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
These hot civil-wars between sects were in turn used by those same external forces to pass the full blame for the chaotic situation onto the Iraqi people. Nevertheless, one thing this example and examples too numerous to number show is that when a whole people is destroyed by an overwhelming outside force those people will turn to their religion for succor. They have nothing else. This doesn't show that those same people, left to pick up the pieces of their civilization in peace, won't learn from their experience and from peaceful and successful nations around the world, how to slowly and no doubt painfully build a free and equal secular state.
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