Murder by Ceasefire: Legitmizing Hamas, Forgetting its Victims

On September 21st 2005, Sasson Nuriel, 55 went to meet with two of his old employees from his candy factory. He had manufactured candy and chocolates before he ran into money problems and had to close his factory and work instead as a consultant. The two former employees told him they had a buisness proposition for him and he went to meet them without fear. Sasson Nuriel spoke arabic fluently and had lived and maintained friendly relationships with them for years.

Instead he was taken to Ramallah, tortured and forced to make a videotaped statement by the two men who in reality were Hamas terrorists. Then he was taken to a garbage dump, stabbed to death and his bleeding body left among the trash.

"It's important that everyone knows who the victim was of this horror: A family man, a working man, who worked with Arabs for years, and accepted them as he accepted all human beings," his wife Ronit Sasson said. "-the people who this are beasts, not people. We dreamed of growing old together, but hideous creatures destroyed our dream."

This was not a unique act. It was not an original atrocity. It was just one of the many terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas. It was one of several carried out during the so-called Hamas ceasefire which pro-Hamas figures in America and Europe are arguing proves that Hamas deserves to be removed from the list of terrorist organizations and its government funded by the international community.

The leader of the European Union monitoring team for the elections, British Conservative MP Edward McMillan-Scott has called for the removal of Hamas from the blacklist of terrorist organizations arguing, "that Hamas has stuck to a ceasefire since February 2005 and that it is now an elected political, Islamist force in the Middle East."

McMillan-Scott who boasts of being related to Lawrence of Arabia and is a good demonstration of how the British Conservatives have now become more left-wing than the Labor party, is merely one of many voices calling for the legitimization of Hamas. The only difference though between them and official figures such as Bush and Blair is that the former want Hamas legitimized with no pre-conditions while the latter would like to see Hamas make some statement recognizing Israel first. All of them employ the sham ceasefire as evidence that Hamas can be trusted.

Sasson Nuriel trusted too.