Reuters, the image-makers

Reuters is currently engaged in a heavy image-making effort to recast Hamas as something other than the jihadi terror group it clearly is.  There was another attack on a UNRWA summer camp in Gaza today by "masked Palestinian gunmen" and although reportedly, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, Reuters recycles its broken boilerplate from previous stories to suggest the perpetrators were other than Hamasniks:

Fundamentalist Muslims, or Salafis -- whose agenda of global or holy war against the West conflicts with Hamas's nationalist goals -- have stepped up attacks in the Gaza Strip over the past several months, targeting Hamas security men and offices.

As we've noted in previous posts, Hamas "nationalist goals" are very much aligned with those of Islamic jihadists around the world.  An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas makes its goals clear in Article Nine of its Charter:

Motives and Objectives
Hamas finds itself at a period of time when Islam has waned away from the reality of life. For this reason, the checks and balances have been upset, concepts have become confused, and values have been transformed; evil has prevailed, oppression and obscurity have reigned; cowards have turned tigers, homelands have been usurped, people have been uprooted and are wandering all over the globe. The state of truth has disappeared and was replaced by the state of evil. Nothing has remained in its right place, for when Islam is removed from the scene, everything changes. These are the motives. As to the objectives: discarding the evil, crushing it and defeating it, so that truth may prevail, homelands revert [to their owners], calls for prayer be heard from their mosques, announcing the reinstitution of the Muslim state. Thus, people and things will revert to their true place.

Thus, Hamas seeks not only the reconquest of the entire Mandate of Palestine (Israel), but also the return of all territories to their previous Muslim "owners", e.g., Moorish Spain.  Further, Hamas wants to see the reconstitution of a global Islamic state -- the Caliphate -- under Sharia law, precisely the mission of Osama bin Laden and the global jihadist movement:

Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that "the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan." His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, "history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government." Another Al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared "Due to the blessings of jihad, America's countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon," to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.

It is simply hogwash to assert, as Reuters does, that Hamas has limited nationalist goals at odds with global holy war against the West.