Hey Hamas supporters, do you support this?

National Post reports this rather nasty news. News that the usual Hamas supporters and apologists that I debate with would rather wasn't made public as it rather queers their claim that Hamas are misunderstood and really rather cuddly, not Islamist terrorists.

'It is three weeks since his arrest, but Ismail Halou still has streaks of purple bruising on the soles of his feet.
The 22-year-old was filling cars at his family’s petrol station in Gaza City at 5 p.m. on April 4 when a black jeep pulled into the forecourt and police stepped out to order him into the car. He was blindfolded and driven to the nearest police station.

“I could hear the screams of people being beaten in the rooms next to me,” he recalled. “Two men held my legs down and tied them together on a wooden board then they beat the soles of my feet with a plastic rod.

They beat me for at least five minutes. I was crying and screaming with agony. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.”

After the beating, officers set to work shaving off the one-inch fin of gelled hair that was the cause of his arrest.

“At no point did they tell me why they had arrested me,” Mr Halou said. “I found out from neighbours when I got home it was my haircut.” He could not walk for three days after his release.

Police in Gaza, the Palestinian coastal enclave run by the Islamist faction Hamas since 2007, have arrested at least 41 men on charges of immodesty this month, some because their haircuts were deemed culturally inappropriate, others because their trousers were either too low-slung or too fitted. Most were beaten, all of them had their heads forcibly shaven.
 

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Hamas security forces routinely use brutal tactics against political opponents in Gaza, but a violently enforced public modesty campaign is new. It has shocked a community hardened to conflict and poverty. Some Gazans are terrified that Hamas is driving them towards unapologetic, militant, Islamic fundamentalism.
 

In March, the United Nations issued a statement cancelling their annual Gaza marathon because Hamas had forbidden women, both local and foreign, from running alongside men, a practice it had allowed for the previous five years. This month a new law was introduced forbidding girls and boys over the age of nine from being educated alongside, or taught by anyone of, the opposite sex.
“There is no question that Gaza is more ’Islamicised’ now that it has been at any point since Hamas took power and it is getting worse,” said Samar Zakout, the deputy director of Al Mezan human rights organisation in Gaza.

“To the international community, the Hamas leadership say they respect human rights. But at home they are struggling to convince their members they are protectors of traditional values.”'

So come on all you screamers of "We are all Hamas now!", what say you now about your cuddly friends?