Obama to ‘Open Channel of Communication’with Hamas
“Incoming U.S. President Barack Obama plans to open a “channel of communication” with the Hamas terrorist organization when he takes office on January 20, according to British newspaper the Guardian.
According to three sources “close to the transition team,” Obama was unlikely to approve direct talks with Hamas initially. However, reported the Guardian, Obama “is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracizing Hamas is counterproductive. A tested course would be to start contacts through Hamas and the US intelligence services, similar to the secret process through which the US engaged with the PLO in the 1970s. Israel did not become aware of the contacts until much later.”
Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, said frankly that “The total isolation of Hamas that we promulgated under Bush is going to end.”
Clemons added that the Obama team would most likely consider a multilateral approach that involves secret envoys talking simultaneously with various parties. “I think it is going to happen.”
Hamas is officially listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization, and the Congress in 2006 legally banned any funding to the group.”
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It is still my policy to withold judgment about our President-Elect until Barack H Obama actually gets into office, but things like this are really beginning to worry me.
