\n<\/p>\n
Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram \u201cDEATH TO COLLABORATORS.\u201d But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
On Sunday evening, a reporter asked the president about reports that Hamas is reestablishing its authority in the Gaza Strip by executing its rivals. Trump said that the group is merely cracking down on crime, for which it has American approval.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey do want to stop the problems, and they\u2019ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are having \u2019em watch that there\u2019s not going to be big crime or some of the problems that you have when you have areas like this that have been literally demolished.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yesterday, talking with reporters in the White House, Trump added more detail to his defense of Hamas. \u201cThey did take out a couple of gangs that were very bad\u2014very, very bad gangs,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd they did take \u2019em out. And they killed a number of gang members. And that didn\u2019t bother me much, to be honest with you. That\u2019s okay. A couple of very bad gangs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why is Trump praising one of the world\u2019s most violent and fanatical terrorist organizations as crime-fighting guardians of public order? Two motives spring to mind.<\/p>\n
First, Trump is invested in his cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas. The terms of the pact are shaky, though. Hamas has agreed to release the bodies of its remaining Israeli hostages, but the group is reluctant to heed demands that it give up power. Its frantic campaign of murder and intimidation against alleged gangsters and gangs\u2014who are mostly anti-Hamas armed groups and dissidents, some with ties to Israel\u2014seems designed to foreclose the political transformation the deal calls for. Admitting that this violence poses a dire threat to the prospect of peace in the region would challenge Trump\u2019s claim to have brought about a historic truce. And so he is reflexively brushing off any news that seems to undermine his own achievement.<\/p>\n
A second, more disturbing explanation is that Trump genuinely does not distinguish between crime-fighting and authoritarian crackdowns. He has praised authoritarian governments elsewhere for using force to suppress protests. In 1990, he told Playboy that China had mistakenly allowed some protests before wisely reversing course: \u201cWhen the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has long praised autocrats who suppress dissent, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan. At a press event on Monday, he praised the dictatorship of Egypt\u2019s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for its supposed tough-on-crime stance: \u201cIt\u2019s about leadership, and it\u2019s really nice when you say, \u2018How is your crime situation?,\u2019 and they don\u2019t even know what you\u2019re talking about. \u2018What do you mean crime? We don\u2019t have crime.\u2019 Because if he has crime, he puts it out very quickly.\u201d Rather than recoil at the sight of masked goons carrying out street justice without due process, Trump seems similarly inclined to praise Hamas for being tough on crime.<\/p>\n
The suggestion that Trump sees Hamas\u2019s tactics as admirable may sound uncharitable, but Trump himself likened Hamas\u2019s approach to his own. Elaborating on his defense of Hamas yesterday, Trump said, \u201cYou know, it\u2019s no different than other countries. Like, Venezuela sent their gangs into us, and we took care of those gangs. We have Washington, D.C.\u2014it\u2019s one of the safest cities in the country. It was one of the worst cities in the country if you go back just a little while ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be clear, it is different: American cities such as Washington, D.C., may be occupied by the National Guard, but U.S. soldiers are not summarily executing people on the streets. Likewise, the spreading abuses associated with ICE\u2019s crackdown fall short of Hamas-level brutality.<\/p>\n
Yet Trump\u2019s cavalier acceptance of these horrors, and his instinct to equate them with his own domestic crackdown, is revealing. It shows how easily he sees crime-fighting as a valid pretext for the naked murder of political rivals. It also shows that he observes no distinction between the level of force he ought to be able to apply and the unaccountable cruelty exercised by one of the world\u2019s most ruthless regimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram \u201cDEATH TO COLLABORATORS.\u201d But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[16800,11064,167,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-28257","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-excuses","9":"tag-hamas","10":"tag-making","11":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}