YOUR QUESTION: Mass Liberation AZ is an organization dedicated to reforming the criminal justice system. Your efforts are widely regarded. Do you have any concerns this reputation will be undermined by saying Hamas is not terrorist organization and The October 7th attack on Jewish civilians was justified?

MLAZ ANSWER: To quote our statement more accurately: We do not condemn Gazan resistance, we condemn the genocidal conditions that led to this violence. Mass Liberation AZ is a principled people’s movement. We are accountable to directly impacted people, therefore, it is our responsibility to tell the truth without concern for our reputation. Western media continues to work from Israeli military talking points rather than doing the diligent work of accurate journalism. A more appropriate question would be: 

Mass Liberation AZ is an organization dedicated to reforming the criminal justice system. Your efforts are widely regarded. How does your work connect with the genocide currently taking place in Gaza? To which we would reply: 

“The conditions of Palestinian people in occupied Palestine, particularly Gaza, but also in the refugee camps in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are a result of settler colonialism in the US and the UK for over 100 years. This was supported by the EU, Nato, and others. The occupying forces that are exterminating Palestinian people in Gaza also train Phoenix police, one of the most deadly police forces in the nation. And, most importantly, just as Nelson Mandela said in his 1997 speech on International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, ‘We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.’”

YOUR QUESTION: Your belief Hamas was democratically elected is challenged by history. It was part of unity government formed in 2006. But Hamas later broke the agreements and started killing Fatah members taking over Gaza in what many governments (not just the U.S. and Israel) say was coup. Can you speak to that? 

MLAZ ANSWER: This question is misleading and based on false information. It’s truly disappointing the amount of misinformation coming from reputable journalists, fueling the American misunderstanding of the situation in Gaza. It was in January 2006 that the Palestinian territories held elections. Hamas won and that is an indisputable fact. To be specific, Hamas won a bare plurality of votes (44%) to Fatah (the moderate) party’s 41%, which amounts to a strong majority of seats (74 to 45). Israel initially promoted Hamas, so, Israel, too, acknowledged Hamas as a legitimate political actor. Additionally, Hamas has a current approval rating among Gazans (57%) that is much higher than Joe Biden in the US (36%) when both were separately polled in July of this year. These approval ratings come after over 17 years in leadership. 

Hamas didn’t ‘break agreements and start killing Fatah members’ as you claim in your misguided question. Rather, the US and Israel used divide-and-rule tactics to attempt a forced regime change, just as they have in other countries around the world. This is not challenged by history, it’s challenged by poor and uneducated reporting. 

• Evidence of divide-and-rule tactics as reported by Vanity Fair: “Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)”

Western media’s desperate need to call Hamas “terrorists” is rooted in Islamophobia. These terms have been used against Palestinians and Arabs throughout the course of their resistance to occupation. Clearly the media has not learned its lessons from the disastrous consequences of “The War on Terror”. Sound journalists must explore these contradictions rather than exploit them.  

YOUR QUESTION: You condemn President Biden, but on his visit he renewed the call for a Two State Solution (in front of Israel’s Prime Minister) does that not matter? 

MLAZ ANSWER: No, it doesn’t matter when Biden is still actively sending hundreds of billions of dollars of “aid” to Israel for the sole purpose of bombing the Palestinian civilians in their homes, schools, hospitals and refugee camps. The money Biden sent Israel paid for illegal white phosphorus bombs. Those are not the actions of someone seeking a solution, those are actions of someone seeking extermination. As recently as 2017, Hamas was willing to accept a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders; Israel declined. At this point a two-state solution is a slogan of the past. It’s clearly no longer on the table. It’s easy for Biden to give this type of lip service because he knows it’s an impossibility. That’s why no one, least of all the Palestinian people, takes Biden seriously. Every action Biden has taken before and after October 7th cements his place in history as the US President who aided and abetted the genocide of the Palestinian people by funding the apartheid state of Israel. He is complicit in genocide.