What Is Hamas Doing On Twitter?
With over 28,000 Twitter followers of its own, the Twitter account for the official military wing of Hamas only follows seven other accounts on the social media platform – those of CNN and six pan-Arab news networks and blogs.
Hamas’s Al Qassam Brigades, one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world, sends out nearly hourly English language updates on its Twitter account, @AlqassamBrigade.
It has used the account to claim responsibility for numerous rocket attacks against Israeli civilian population zones in the last few days as well as attacks against the Israel Air Force operating in the Gaza Strip.
The Al Qassam Brigades officially follows the twitter accounts of CNN’s Arabic network as well as Al Jazeera, and the Egypt-based Al-Ahram media group.
The Hamas jihad group follows four pro-Palestinian blogs, including Electronic Intifada. That account was co-founded by Chicagoan Ali Abunimah, a pro-Palestinian activist who was an associate of President Obama’s in the 1990s.
In the 1990s, Obama was a speaker at events in Chicago’s large Palestinian immigrant community to raise funds for UN camps for Palestinian refugees. Abunimah recalls introducing Obama at one such event, a 1999 fundraiser for the Deheisha Palestinian camp in the West Bank.
“I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator – when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time,” stated Abuminah during an interview in 2008 with Democracy Now!, a nationally syndicated radio and television political program.
“And that’s just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation,” Abunimah said.