If there is evidence for that, I'd love to see it, but Hamas didn't get founded till 1987, so anything before that can at most amount to funding for a precursor organization.
> as for hamas growth, above is certainly correct, i've said same thing
> on e-lists more than once over the years... mh
Sometimes, some leftists in the West develop a kind of conspiracy theory based on wishful thinking. They just can't admit that people they think they support, e.g., the Palestinians, sometimes support entities they don't support, e.g., Hamas. To overcome this apparent gap between what leftists want and what the people leftists think they support want, they develop an idea that entities they don't like -- e.g., Tel Aviv and Hamas -- not only mutually depend on each other in a Hegelian dialectical fashion but also one is literally the creature of the other. It seems to me that it is important for us to acknowledge that quite often leftists in the West and peoples outside the West don't think politically alike. Many Russians, to this day, think Stalin is a greater leader than Lenin or Gorbachev and they apparently prefer Peter I and Alexander II to Stalin (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2005/2005-January/000801.html>), to take just one example. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>