Hamas Social Media Campaign Backfires

Yesterday, Hamas announced that it would be launching a five-day social media campaign, with the aim of softening the internationally recognized terrorist group’s image. Using the hashtag #AskHamas, the organization’s media coordinator Taher al-Nounou promised to answer queries about the group, in order to “clarify Hamas’ true positions.” The campaign was not set to begin until Friday afternoon, but it has already gone viral–for all the wrong reasons.

#AskHamas has been tweeted over 17,000 times, but the questions are not the ones the group was hoping to receive:

#AskHamas Why did you murder 30 civilians, including 20 people over the age of 70, at a Passover seder in Netanya in 2002?



— Jeffrey Goldberg (@JeffreyGoldberg) March 12, 2015

#AskHamas How do you feel about your leader hiding out in a fancy hotel in Doha while there was a war in Gaza?



— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) March 13, 2015

Here follows a list of Hamas investments and efforts to build up Gaza. 1) #AskHamas



— Kay Wilson (@kishkushkay) March 12, 2015

#AskHamas If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one to hear it fall, is it still Israel’s fault?



— Robert Joffe (@RobertJoffe) March 13, 2015

Hamas’s media strategy long ago descended into self-parody, dating back to the summer’s Gaza war, when their spokesman Osama Hamdan defended his claim that Jews bake their Passover matza with the blood of Christians by telling CNN “I have Jewish friends.” The hashtag campaign has proven so predictably disastrous, however, that one can’t help but wonder:

#AskHamas This hashtag campaign seems like a very bad idea. Are you sure the guy who suggested it isn’t actually a Mossad spy? Just saying.



— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) March 12, 2015

Related: A Tale of Three Twitter Feeds: Hamas Tweets in Arabic, English, and Hebrew