Following are excerpts
from a public address delivered by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya,
which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on September 8, 2010:
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 US 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 US 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 US
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.
[...]
