Following are excerpts from a public address delivered by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on September 8, 2010:
To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memri.org/legacy/clip/0/0/0/0/0/0/2613.
Also visit the MEMRI Palestinian Media Studies Project page, http://www.memri.org/palestinianmediastudiesproject.
Ismail Haniya: "[This gathering] is a message of defense of our Koran, the eternal constitution of Allah, in response to that lying sinner, that criminal insane pastor, who expresses an insane Western desire, which targets the Koran, Islam, the law of Allah, and the Islamic nation, in Palestine and elsewhere. Today, on their day of celebration, people gather in their thousands, to say: The Koran is our constitution, and we adhere to it. [...]
"Our response to that liar will be to raise the Koran in our right hand and to say: The Koran is our constitution, Allah is our destination, the Prophet Muhammad is our leader, Jihad is our path, and death for the sake of Allah is our most supreme desire. [...]
"On this day of blessed celebration, the glad tidings of victory are emerging. The first is the defeat of the U.S. army in Iraq. Those Americans, who came to Iraq in order to swallow it up, along with the entire region, and in order to strike a blow at the Arab and Islamic countries, and to strike a blow at the enterprises of resistance, and to try to eliminate the Palestinian issue – the price they paid in Iraq was very high, in terms of material and human losses.
"The U.S. administration and the American people are no longer able to bear the cost, both in human lives and in material losses. They had no choice but to withdraw from Iraq, on the grounds that they could not attain victory on the soil of our sister, Iraq. Therefore, we salute the heroic Iraqi resistance, which persevered in the true battlefield of resistance – confronting the occupier and the Western coalition. Iraq has paid the price with the blood of its sons, and with prisons such as Abu Ghreib, but they were steadfast and broke the backbone of America.
"Today, none of the U.S. leaders, past or present, can deliver a victory speech. There is no victory. There is only withdrawal from Iraq in the dark of night. These are the first glad tidings of victory. It has bearing upon the blunder in Afghanistan – the blunder and collapse in terms of security and morale of the armies of the Western coalition in Jihad-fighting and Muslim Afghanistan. Yes, dear brothers, we can say with all confidence that the American enterprise in the region has begun to crumble, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and here, on the land of Palestine." [...]
