No Empires Misses Alan Johnston Pt. 2

Both the BBC and The New York Times recently reported that Hamas arrested "a spokesman" for Army of Islam, the Palestinian group that kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Of course, this is absolutely terrifying, considering the tape AOI recently released in which Johnston explains how his captors will kill him if any rescue attempts are made. The Hamas government has rightly made the Johnston case a major issue in its attempts to stabilize Gaza.

The article can be found here. Note that while the Times's Steven Erlanger can't come up with much negative to say about Hamas's latest attempts to free the Johnston, he adds to the end of his article a bizarrely disconnected fact-sheet of sorts on the organization and on Israel/Palestine in general, starting with information on how the Hamas government "organizes religious and charitable institutions that are also used to recruit members and sometimes armed fighters" and later outlining recent arrests of Hamas members, which of course brings the article full circle and seems to call into question whether the democratically elected Hamas government has any right to arrest anyone at all.

About six months ago, one-half of No Empires wrote a letter to the NYT editor to bemoan Erlanger'sround shoddy reportage from Israel--he's a huge fan of the bumbling, ideologically-motivated subject change evidenced above. The letter apparently couldn't pass muster at "the paper of record," and was never printed.

Both at home and abroad, this insistance on the illegitimacy of the Hamas government allows the vacuum of leadership evidenced by groups such as the AOI, as well as the Johnston kidnapping, to continue. This crisis of leadership dates back at least to the death of Yasir Arafat, if not to the era of the thoroughly-discredited Oslo accords, and it seems that despite Hamas's efforts, the situation is only getting worse. No Empires would finally like to point out that NOTHING good can come of this, particularly if Johnston is indeed killed (which, unfortunately, seems more and more likely as those on all sides get increasingly desperate).