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British-Palestinian academic Ghada Karmi praised Hamas during her speech at the Islamic Human Rights Council (IHRC) Genocide Memorial Day on January 19, 2025. She said that she would like to "pay tribute to Hamas," which has been "completely demonized." Karmi said that Israel cannot be accommodated or reformed, nor could it be made to join the human family, and therefore it must be dismantled. She added that it is necessary to work towards ridding the region and the world of Israel. Speakers at the event spoke into microphones of Iran state English-language Press TV and Iran Press news agency. The Islamic Human Rights Council is based in London, and it has been accused of having direct ties to Iran.
Ghada Karmi: "I want at this point to pay tribute to Hamas. Because, you know, one of the things about the way this situation has been reported, it has forced people to see is that Hamas has been completely demonized. They are... You could imagine them as Martians who came down from Mars and have no relationship to human beings at all, and they're just random terrorists who go around killing Jews. You know, I mean, very crudely, that is the picture that's been put forward.
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"I think it's worth our while to pause and pay tribute to the resistance of the people of Gaza and of Hamas. Without that, really you know, without that, without that extraordinary resilience, that extraordinary resistance, we wouldn't be here at all. We wouldn't be here at all. And the fact that Israel has been forced to accept things it has turned down before, always turned down, is an indication of the victory of Palestinian resistance and the defeat of Israel.
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"You cannot accommodate Israel. The Israel that we know, that behaves like this, that is an apartheid state, that is a violent state and that commits Jew-icide – genocide – is not a state you can accommodate, nobody can, in any region. So that's point number one. Point number two: you cannot reform it either. You cannot change Israel. You cannot make it join the human family. You cannot affect the way it really behaves, it will always behave in the same way. So, you can't accommodate it and you can't reform it. So what do you want to do about it? Well I would say you have to dismantle it.
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"That is, in my view, the stage we need to be working towards. Which is how we rid the region and the world of a state which has shown itself to be criminal, genocidal, apartheid, undesirable in every single imaginable way. How... What do you want to do about it? So I reiterate again, you cannot accommodate it, you cannot reform it, so you must dismantle it."
