Nobody Bothers To Read Me Anymore

By the Hamas Charter

If I have one complaint about all the people outside the Middle East and their support for Palestinians based on liberal Western values, it would be: have you even read me? I didn’t think so.

I know I’ll sound much older when I say this – I’m only 26 – but nobody knows how to read anymore. Least of all read me. You’d think that after actually seeing that my various articles are suffused with antisemitic canards, conspiracy theories, Nazi-like calls for genocide, and utter rejection of any Western notions of tolerance, people would think twice about supporting the organization that spawned me. But no. I get ignored while thousands of blowhards around the world defend Hamas as some kind of 1789 Constitutional Convention. Nobody even bothers to read me.

I mean, it’s all there, black on white. Take Article 13:  “There is no negotiated settlement possible. Jihad is the only answer.” We’re not talking about Martin Luther King here. These guys would take Martin Luther King and throw him off a building – then claim Israel killed him, and claim the death as justification for more violence. But when it comes to getting down and reading me – I’m not much longer than any other item in a typical political science curriculum – nobody seems to have opened me up and looked at what I say.

Then there are Articles 22, 28, and 32, which read like Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – and for good reason, considering the influence of the latter on the former, and the fact that Article 32 in particular quotes it at length, as if authoritative. If people would bother to read, they might pick up on the similarities – but the only people who read that, or me, anymore, are the ones who already have an antisemitic agenda. I get no attention from anyone else.

Obviously none of that bothers the people who follow me, since they’re more than happy to exploit the naivety for their own purposes. But I’m a document. I don’t have an agenda. I just have this silly notion that something composed with great fanfare, a charter that guides the behavior of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people, should get read more often. Clearly, the bourgeois dilettantes demonstrating on college campuses across the US disagree.

If we were discussing a bunch of illiterates, I would feel less offended. But it’s as if these folks don’t actually care what I say. And when confronted, just make excuses for it.

Now I know how the New Testament feels.