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Source: http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Hamass-useless-attempt-to-plead-innocence-362187
Hamas' Useless Attempt to Plead Innocence
(Jerusalem Post) Lenny Ben-David - There is a media campaign underway attempting to wash the blood of three innocent Israeli teens off the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization. Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority urgently seek exoneration to protect the PA-Hamas reconciliation agreement. "The whole issue of who did this, we don't know, really, even though Israel managed to punish everybody," said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior PLO official, to The New York Times. "Hamas has never been self-effacing. Whenever they carried out an operation, they always declared it and took responsibility." According to Israeli reporter Shlomi Eldar, a "rogue" group was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of the three boys. Hamaas'denial of responsibility is a longtime tradition in Palestinian terrorist operations. The lies provided "plausible deniability" to the PLO and Yasser Arafat in the early 1970s. In September 1971, Fatah secretly established a terrorist unit called "Black September" to carry out major attacks on Israeli and Western targets, such as the murder of Israeli sportsmen at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Terrorist leader Salah Khalaf (aka Abu Iyad) wrote in his book Stateless that members of Black September "always denied any ties between their organization and Fatah or the PLO." The decentralization of Hamas today is vital to its operations and the survival of its leadership. Who is responsible for the kidnapping of the Israeli teens and the rocket barrage from Gaza launched at Israel? None of its leaders, Hamas claims. All of them, Israel insists. No one should absolve the terrorists' leadership, even if the lines of authority are temporarily and purposely blurred.