7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Web watch
Visiting Hamas
http://www.palestine-info.org/hamas/index-h.html
Under normal circumstances, surfing the Web site of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas could be a mundane experience, albeit informative for the researcher interested in the Middle East. But when you're there right after its military wing, Kata'eb Ezzedin Al-Qassam, claims responsibility for a suicide bomb that killed 19 Israelis and injured approximately 100, the experience is different.
This is the site of the movement that just carried out one of the largest military operations in Israel's history -- which, in turn, will likely lead Israel to retaliate with all its military might.
The first Hamas site, www.hamas.org, no longer exists and the current page carries no explanation of this. To refresh your memory, a cyber war between Palestinian and Israeli sites led to hamas.org crashing a few months ago.
This site, though, is loaded with everything you need to know about the movement, except, of course, details of their recent military operations. The entire site is in Arabic, unfortunately. But at least any reader of Arabic can read it without requiring an Arabic-language support system, because the entire content is placed as image, while some files open in PDF. Those who don't read Arabic can access to the latest news posted by the movement in English, French and Russian on the site that hosts Hamas, www.palestine-info.org.
Hamas explains itself in the "introduction to the movement" section as "a popular resistance movement" that aims at providing the appropriate environment to achieve "liberation for the Palestinian people." The movement's logo, its philosophy, history, "struggle with Zionism," its relations with the other Palestinian factions and the Palestinian Authority and its views on the peace process are explained clearly and concisely -- and, surprisingly, without rhetoric.
The other sections have headings like "Hamas documents," "record of glory," "the symbols of the movement" and "statements and press releases." The latter provides a list of links to up-to-date statements on ongoing events, but none of them actually open. Instead, users get a "page cannot be found" response explaining that "the page you are looking for might be removed, had its name changed or is temporarily unavailable." Hacked again? The correspondence e-mail listed at the bottom of the page did not answer the question posted to it by Al-Ahram Weekly.
But the amount of information available makes up for this somewhat. There is plenty of data on the Jordanian-Israeli peace deal, for example, that very few existing archives have. The CVs of the movement's key figures are there for any reporter or researcher to use. It's all out there, on a very crowded, rather primitive site whose providers might be changing history in this part of the world.
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