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The “mission” Hamas performed on October 7 has been viewed mostly through the lens of one-man’s-freedom-fighter-is-another-man’s-terrorist. Thus, the Hamas operatives who bulldozed through or paraglided across the Gaza-Israeli border to cause carnage at the Nova Music Festival, the kibbutz of Kfar Azar and elsewhere were acting—however misguidedly or brutally—in the cause of national liberation. But what if that assumption is wrong? What if Hamas is not a patriotic undertaking? Even the formal title of the organisation, the Islamic Resistance Movement, suggests it is something other than an emancipatory movement. The challenge posed by Hamas cannot be addressed if the meaning and purpose of its actions are not comprehended. Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, advises us to “know our enemies”. It is time—way past time—to make sense of Hamas.
Few commentators in the mainstream media have condoned the events of October 7. After all, the slaughter of more than 1400 civilians and the wounding of another 5000, plus the kidnapping of more than 200 others, constitutes the single worst day of Jew-killing since the Holocaust. Most opponents of Israel do not want their “principled” anti-Zionism conflated with vulgar anti-Semitic bigotry. Often, though, their condemnations of Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm were equivocal. Palestinian American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, for instance, declared her unhappiness at the targeting of women and children on October 7 while adding that she “grieved the loss of Palestinian and Israeli lives”. Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn responded similarly when he declared that all attacks are wrong. The inference here being that the State of Israel also targets civilians, not least Gazans trapped in their “open-air prison”. In other words, Hamas’s savagery is ultimately a response to Israel’s savagery.
This essay appears in the latest Quadrant
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Tlaib and Corbyn adopted a less ambivalent approach when Gaza’s Ministry of Health accused the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of targeting Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital and allegedly killing 500 civilians. Now there was no equitable talk of all attacks. Tweeted Tlaib: “Bombing a hospital is among the gravest of war crimes. The IDF reportedly blowing up one of the few places the injured and wounded can seek medical treatment and shelter during a war is horrific. @POTUS needs to push for an immediate ceasefire to end this slaughter.” Corbyn took an equally uncompromising line: “Israeli air strikes have hit Al Ahli hospital in Gaza. More than 500 people – patients, doctors & those sheltering – have been killed. What unspeakable horror. We will mourn their loss forever.” No record exists of Corbyn intending to mourn forever the victims of Operation Al-Aqsa Storm.
Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital, as it turns out, was not attacked by the IDF. According to the latest intelligence reports, including a French one, an errant missile fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, landed in the hospital’s courtyard, killing as many as a hundred people. The launch site of the missile, we know from a radio intercept of Hamas operatives, was a cemetery beside the hospital. Tlaib and Corbyn were criticised for refusing to accept that Gaza’s Ministry of Health, an instrument of the Islamic Resistance Movement, had lied outright about the source of the carnage. The world’s news services, from the BBC and CNN to the New York Times, also blamed the IDF for the hospital attack, though all eventually retracted their endorsement of Hamas’s false narrative. But the damage was done. They had already played their part in Hamas’s never-ending project to demonise and delegitimise the Jewish state in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of the Muslim world especially.
Why, exactly, did the New York Times lead with a headline repeating the propaganda of Gaza’s Ministry of Health? The supposed newspaper of record explained its monumental mistake by opining, in “After Hospital Blast, Headlines Shift with Changing Claims”, that reporting accurately on events in Gaza was almost impossible because independent journalists are barred from being there. Why would that be? Perhaps because the Islamic Resistance Movement and its sundry allies are totalitarian organisations. And what, we might ask, is one of the defining characteristics of totalitarians, from Stalin and Mao to Hitler? The Big Lie. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, encapsulated the phenomenon:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained for only such time as the State can shield the people from the consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
The totalitarianism of Hamas, and hence its facility with the Big Lie, should not have been beyond the investigatory capabilities of the New York Times. The Islamic Resistance Movement’s despotic rule in Gaza is not exactly a secret. Israel withdrew from Gaza as long ago as 2005. Two years afterwards, the Islamic Resistance Movement mounted a putsch against Fatah/PA and installed itself as the central authority. Although Israel enforces a strict border policy, it cannot fence off Gaza from the rest of the world because Egypt also borders Gaza. Second, Gaza’s authorities must take responsibility for their territory, given the place achieved de facto independence almost twenty years ago. Third, Gaza lies on the Mediterranean Sea, real estate of a premium type. If Hamas ever had a mind to invest in commercial endeavours, rather than in Iranian-backed missiles and murder, Gaza today would be a very different place. But the truth, as Goebbels pointed out, is the mortal enemy of the Big Lie. The Big Lie, in this case, is that Gaza is an “open-air prison” due to the Israelis, when it is Hamas that holds the jailhouse keys.
The New York Times admitted it had been “incorrect” to rely on the Gazan Ministry of Health for its headline, “Israel Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say”. That does not begin to address the paper’s “mistake”. How could officials at the Gazan Ministry of Health have done anything other than repeat Hamas disinformation? A 2022 report on human rights, issued by the US Department of State, had this to say about Hamas governance:
With respect to Hamas: credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings by Hamas personnel; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by Hamas personnel; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including violence, threats of violence, arbitrary arrests or prosecutions of journalists, censorship, and criminalization of libel and slander …
The report included criticisms of Israel, and the tyranny and corruption of PA rule in the West Bank go without saying, but—again—why did the New York Times produce a dangerously emotive headline based on Hamas disinformation when the totalitarian character of the Islamic Resistance Movement must have been known to them?
The Big Lie was also evident in Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh’s call for the world community to pressure Israel into halting its Operation Swords of Iron in Gaza to save “our children, women, and elderly, our mosques, our universities, and our homes”. Since 2007, Hamas has repeatedly committed terrorist acts not only to kill Israeli civilians but also to bring death to its own captive population. That is why Haniyeh also spoke of the need for the “blood of the women, children, and elderly” in Gaza to “awaken within us the revolutionary spirit”. In advance of Operation Swords of Iron, we learnt, Hamas built 500 kilometres of tunnels in Gaza to protect its militia but no bomb shelters for its vulnerable citizenry. Hamas, in short, purposely sacrifices the lives of its people so they might serve as (unwilling) martyrs to advance the anti-Zionist cause around the world. They have played the same diabolical game over and over again throughout the years and yet there are those in the West who fall for it every time.
The answer is to be found in the adoption by many in the West of the settler-colonial narrative. In this version of wokeism, Palestinian Arabs are accorded the role of indigenous victims of white supremacism. From this perspective, at least, Palestinian Arabs (including Hamas and Fatah) can never be entirely in the wrong because they are historically in the right, while Israelis can never be wholly victims—whatever the circumstances—since Zionism is a historical wrong. The arc of justice, then, always bends towards Palestinian Arabs. Mohammed Amin al-Husseini’s affinity for Adolf Hitler and friendship with Adolf Eichmann make no difference to a Zionophobe. The Grand Mufti was “a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in Mandatory Palestine”, as Wikipedia describes him, and so if his righteous anger caused him to overstep the boundaries of propriety, Zionism was to blame. If Husseini himself never identified as a “Palestinian”, that being the designation of Jews living in Mandatory Palestine until May 14, 1948, and wanted only for Jerusalem and its environs to be incorporated into Greater Syria, that was no more than a quirk of twentieth-century history. If over 90 per cent of post-First World War “Palestine” was transferred to the Arabs in 1921—that is, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—and even if Amin al-Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee rejected the UN 1947 partition plan for the residual 10 per cent, Zionism was still a colonial project and had no place in the Levant.
The last time Arabs, in the form of Jordanians, ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City—from 1949 to 1967—all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s thirty-five synagogues was demolished. Bernard Lewis, in Notes on a Century (2012), reminded us that Israeli Christians were only permitted to visit the Old City, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, once a year on Christmas Day (but not the Orthodox Christmas). And Israeli Jews were expressly forbidden from entering eastern Jerusalem and the Old City. Even more disturbing, the “inhabitants of the ancient Jewish Quarter were evicted, and even dead Jews were removed from their graves in the ancient cemeteries”. Despite its victory against Jordan in the Six-Day War, giving it control of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem (including the Old City), Israel allowed Jordan’s Waqf officials to remain as the managers of Al-Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim sites on Temple Mount. Today Israel’s magnanimity is rewarded by Waqf officials siding with Hamas and Fatah whenever the latest riot breaks out in the neighbourhood.
Why are these counterpoints rarely mentioned in the public domain? Because complications of this kind do not align with the colonial-settler narrative. The plight of Palestinian Arabs, from this viewpoint, is akin to the Powhatan natives ravaged by the English colonialists in Walt Disney’s animation Pocahontas (1995). Faultless Powhatan Native Americans/Palestinian Arabs existed in a state of sacred harmony until Westerners/Zionists descended on paradise like “ravenous wolves” to “devour everything in their path”. The indigenous/non-indigenous dichotomy, as Roger Sandall pointed out in The Culture Cult (2000), is a tale of oppressor versus victim in which the mostly ghastly acts performed by the assigned victim group can always be excused if not justified. In the Australian context, Germaine Greer, in On Rage (2008), rationalised the violence perpetrated by indigenous Australian men against indigenous Australian women and children in outback Australia, documented in the Little Children are Sacred report (2007), as a function of “hunter-gatherer” men’s rage at being deprived of their land by “Whitey”.
The progressive or leftist mindset, as Roger Scruton explained in The Uses of Pessimism (2010), almost always falls prey to the Zero-Sum Fallacy, the insistence that every relationship on the planet—men/women, white/non-white, heterosexual/LGBT+, Israelis/Palestinians—must have a winner and a loser. “Who? Whom?” is the Leninist question—who is the exploiter, and who is being exploited? While the conservative or moderate Westerner is mostly satisfied with “compromise and half measures”, our woke compatriots, obsessed with their “rainbow of resentments”, view accommodation and compromise as a manifestation of false consciousness. For progressives, informed by a tribal mentality that goes all the way back to the life-and-death struggle of our ancestors in the Pleistocene age, the Jewish State must necessarily be an “apartheid state” given that 20 per cent of the population of Israel proper is non-Jewish. The appointment of the Israeli-Arab judge Khaled Kabub to Israel’s Supreme Court, the role of the Arab political parties in the previous national government, Tel Aviv’s place as the gay Arab capital of the Middle East, Christian Arabs’ academic success compared to their Jewish counterparts and on and on do not fit the “fact pattern” of a zero-sum analysis. So they can be safely ignored.
Better by far—or, at least, simpler by far—to keep to Lenin’s “Who? Whom?” maxim. The colonial-settler narrative is a sub-category of the wokeist creed (see “America’s Great Awokening” Quadrant, August 2021) currently poisoning American and Australian education. The old Marxist canard of class struggle has been replaced by race struggle, an even sharper struggle if the race happens to be indigenous. Thus, the Jews must have no claim on indigeneity even if that means Fatah and Hamas scholars rejecting the evidence of ancient Jewish temples on Temple Mount. A “white Jew” in Nazi Germany was a term of derision for non-Jewish Germans who showed any sympathy for Jewish people. Today, in contrast, a “white Jew” denotes Israelis and their colonialist occupation of the stolen land of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Given the propensity of wokeist educators for zero-sum thinking, we should not be surprised that a startling 48 per cent of young people, according to a recent Harvard-Harris poll, supported Hamas over Israel in the aftermath of October 7.
The Israeli historian and famed author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, co-signed a letter condemning the “indifference” of Western progressives to the harrowing events of October 7, not to mention elements of the “global Left” who actually “justified Hamas’s actions”. The mostly progressive Israeli signatories of “Statement on Behalf of Israel-based Progressive and Peace Activists” had been “completely devastated” by the response of their non-Israeli political allies: “We never imagined that individuals of the left, advocates of equality, freedom, justice, and welfare, would reveal such extreme moral insensitivity and political recklessness.” Harari, we should note, is a high-profile opponent of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a veritable peacenik who advocates the two-state solution. The problem with a two-state solution, however, is that Palestinian Arab leaders, from Mohammed Amin al-Husseini’s Arab Higher Committee and Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation to Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine National Authority Organisation, have never been disposed to achieving anything less than the eradication of Zionists “from the river to the sea”.
Even Israel-haters who nevertheless characterise Hamas as terrorists can still hold the Jewish state responsible, albeit indirectly, for October 7. Hamas would not be a critical factor in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, or so their narrative goes, if Palestinian Arabs had been treated more equitably in the past. In short, the gruesome slaughterfest on October 7 was, to borrow from Ward Churchill’s infamous jibe about 9/11, “chickens coming home to roost”. One of the problems with such a response, as I outlined in “Twenty Years On: Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 Mission”, (Quadrant, September 2021), is that Islamic revivalism—be it passive Salafism, activist Salafism or Salafi-jihadism—has its origins in the Islamic world of the eighteenth century. The ideology of Hamas, not to mention al-Qaeda, the Islamic State group, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah and others, is ultimately a response to Western-inspired humanism, dating back to the seventeenth century. We might agree that Osama bin Laden declared war on America after being irked by Washington providing security for Saudi Arabia in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990. Nonetheless, “the Sheikh” was on the lookout for any excuse to wage violent jihad against infidels and heretics—including regular Muslims—who contaminated the Dar al-Islam (House of Peace).
If there is a “root cause”—as progressives like to say—of September 11 or October 7, it is the anti-modernity xenophobia of Muhammed ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, an Arabian scholar who died as long ago as 1792. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab insisted that “true” Islam required purging Arabian society of all historical embellishments with which he did not agree. Islamic humanism found itself pitched against fanatical religiosity. The active Salafism of Hassan al-Banna’s Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, founded after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire in 1924, was the next big marker in Islamic revivalism; Salafi-jihadism, in the manner of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group, represent the latest episode of violent apocalyptic millennialism determined to re-constitute Dar al-Islam and re-ignite its showdown with Dar al-Harb (the non-Islamic world). Although Hamas talks of liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea”, its ambitions go further than establishing an Islamic Republic of Palestine. As Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Zahar declared in December 2022:
Israel is only the first target. The entire planet will be under our law … The entire 510 million square kilometres of Planet Earth will come under a system where there is no injustice, no oppression, and no killings and crimes like those being committed against the Palestinians and the Arabs in all the Arab countries, in Lebanon, Iraq and other countries.
The ambition of Hamas to destroy the “colonial Zionist project”, therefore, is based on the millennialist ambitions of Islamic revivalism rather than the failure of the Oslo agreements, negotiations that in any case Hamas eschewed. The Islamic Resistance Movement seeks to eradicate the Jewish state simply because it is a Jewish state and not a radical Islamic theocracy.
Misuse of the Nazi allegory has become so pervasive that in 1990 Mike Godwin, an American academic, successfully propagated Godwin’s Law or Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies, the notion that as “an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”. In the case of Hamas, however, we are not talking Nazi allegory or analogy but Nazi reality. The Hamas-Nazi connection goes further than the murder of civilians, specifically Jewish civilians. It goes to the meaning and purpose of the murder of Jewish civilians. Hamas’s 1988 Covenant mixes the very worst of European anti-Semitism with (Islam’s) Day of Judgment to create a potent new religious-political brew, one we might fairly call Islamo-Nazism. Pro-Hamas demonstrations have been held in all the major cities in the West, from New York and London to Sydney. The more responsible organisers of these gatherings have expressed disapproval of the repeated outbreak of “Gas the Jews!” chants in their midst. Better they condemned rather than condoned the chanting, and yet the fact remains: the totalitarian ideology of Hamas has Nazi implications.
The greatest achievement of Arab Palestinian leaders has been to project their own ties with Nazism—including the millennialist psychosis of annihilating the Jews to initiate a thousand-year kingdom of heavenly peace—onto Zionism. We are talking not only about Hamas here but also Fatah, notwithstanding the latter’s claim to be secular. After all, Mahmoud Abbas’s 1982 doctoral thesis, awarded by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, is titled “The Relationship Between Zionists and Nazis, 1933–45”. “Holocaust Inversion” is the expression Robert Wistrich used to describe the supposed correlation between Nazism and Zionism. Modern-day leftism, obsessed with race and zero-sum relationships, views everything Israel does as adding to the Nazi-Zionist equation, whether it is the War of Independence or the Six-Day War or the First and Second Intifada. For Holocaust Inverters, the erection of the West Bank barrier, for instance, was not to protect Israeli civilians from terrorist attacks; it was about interning West Bank Arabs as per the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The same applies to the containment/blockade of the Gaza Strip. For the Inverter and anyone justifying—directly or indirectly—October 7, barriers create terrorism; for those with any empathy for Israelis, Jewish and Arab citizens alike, terrorism creates barriers.
One of the meanings of October 7, then, is that Islamic revivalism—be it Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, or Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran—will not rest until the obstacle of “Little Satan” is overcome to make way for a brave new world of peace/theocratic totalitarianism. The Zionist project, which became the State of Israel in 1948, was always going to attract the ire of religious fanatics hell-bent on “purifying” the territories of the Ottoman Caliphate. Israel, if it wishes to survive in the long term, has no choice but to destroy its mortal enemy or, at least, seriously diminish its power and reach. That said, Israel’s enemy is not Islam per se, as Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin reminded the world: “We have no dispute with Islam, we did not have, we will not have, and, today, too, we don’t have.” The veracity of this statement is confirmed by any number of things, not least the Abraham Accords and Israel’s warm relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco.
That Islam is not a single monolithic entity cuts both ways. On the one hand, we cannot blame ordinary sane Muslims for 9/11 or October 7; on the other, notwithstanding the protests of progressive politicians such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, there really is an ominous phenomenon at work in the world which can and should be called radical Islamic terrorism. Moreover, Salafi jihadists, such as Osama bin Laden, begin their journey as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a progeny. Modernity—not “Great Satan” and “Little Satan” as such—has challenged the certainties of life in the Greater Middle East, a theme Ali Allawi explores to great effect in The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation (2009). Islamic revivalists are not so much outraged at what the West does as with the fact that the West exists. The Islamic revivalists despise Muslim “moderns” as much as they despise regular Westerners. For a time, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Bernard Lewis was given a platform by the mainstream media to inform America and the wider West about the peril of Islamic revivalism—in What Went Wrong? (2002), for instance—but our PC or wokeist gatekeepers managed to shut that down. It is not for Westerners, as the acolytes of Edward Said continue to indoctrinate our young, to criticise those who would, if given the opportunity, lop off our heads or burn us alive.
Today, as a consequence, the atrocities of October 7 are understood by wokeist and clueless Westerners as a function of the “colonial Zionist project” or, worse, the Nazism-fascism of the Jewish State, as exemplified by Mike Carlton’s 2014 article “Israel’s Rank and Rotten Fruit is Being Called Fascism”. Carlton’s disparagement of Israel’s response to Hamas’s terrorism had all the hallmarks of Holocaust Inversion. And so it is today with Westerners who equate the inadvertent deaths of Gazan civilians from the IDF’s Operation Swords of Iron with the murder, torture, rape and kidnapping of civilians in Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Storm. Here is a form of moral depravity only exceeded by those shouting “Gas the Jews!”
Richard Landes, in Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong? (2022), warns that the convergence of Western postmodern (woke) millennialists with Islamic pre-modern Caliphators is a marriage made in hell. To conflate apocalyptic Global Jihad with the bending of history towards justice is a madness all of its own. If we continue down this track, the West—not just Israel—will be in even deeper peril. That may be the ultimate meaning of October 7.
Daryl McCann, a frequent contributor, has a blog at https://darylmccann.blogspot.com.
Sober and lucid analysis.The historical, intellectual and moral gymnastics required by those who would see the tyrannical overlords of Gaza, bound by a suffocating medieval theocracy, as victims of the vast systemic freedoms that accompanies western values and civilisation, would put to shame a triple backflip summersault with a two and half reverse pike from the standing pommel horse.
A splendid analysis Daryl, as usual. Thanks.
A fine analysis.
The woman with the sign “There is only one solution ” is correct. However it is not the solution she is espousing. The solution is the complete and utter destruction of Hamas to the extent that any other would-be destroyer of Israel will take it as a sign that they too will suffer the same fate.
It is not just Israel facing a challenge to its existence but the whole concept of our civilization.
David writes that “The solution is the complete and utter destruction of Hamas to the extent that any other would-be destroyer of Israel will take it as a sign that they too will suffer the same fate”. I think that if Hamas is destroyed it will be replaced; indeed, it has to be replaced because there needs to be an authority for the patch of earth we call Gaza. When most Gazan adults voted for Hamas 15 years ago they obviously thought it was the best choice of the choices available to them. Similarly, the Israeli Jews voted to install the current Netanyahu government. Voters vote and get what they voted for.
Hamas, elected by the Palestinians, has done outrageous things.
The Israeli government, elected by Israelis, has done outrageous things.
Not many commentators discuss the plausibility of a one state solution. This is favoured by some Palestinians and nearly all Haredi Jews. If there was not so much distrust and hatred between the two sides this would be on the table right now.
In the English and Australian press of the 1930s and 1940s the Israeli killers of English and other European diplomats and other officials were obviously regarded as terrorists. This goes to your point that a murderer is a terrorist from one perspective is a freedom fighter from the opposite perspective. They way I see it, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are and have long been legitimately aggrieved by the status quo – the growing settlements, the daily frustrations and humiliations, the refusal of the USA, Israel and three atolls in the South Pacific to accept what 99% of the world accepts as a fair resolution, means that they need to fight for justice. And for the last 80 years political and diplomatic measures have largely proved fruitless. Not that the military approach has been successful, but the fact that they feel driven to use violence means that they feel deeply aggrieved.
The current conflict presents an opportunity to go back to the drawing board to look again at either a one state or a two state solution to the conflict. In the early 1960s Moshe Dayan thought that an enduring peace could only be achieved with a single secular state, with one vote one value for all citizens, that is, all Jews, and all Palestinians. Jews and Palestinians lived fairly peaceably together in the Levant until the 20th century, and this could happen again if the fighting stopped. Israel needs another Yitzak Rabin and the Palestinians another Arafat.
The reason there was peace was the clear knowledge that the Ottoman Sultan was sovereign. Muslims cannot readily accept non-Muslim rule, hence why we often hear about introducing Shariah in the West. Christians in the Orient have had to get used to it, and in fairness have received somewhat better treatment than Muslims in Christian lands did until recently, maybe because they were useful subjects and not viewed as a threat. Render unto Caesar etcetera. Judaism is specifically adapted to maintaining separate communities whilst living amongst the goyim and maintaining good relations with their rulers.
There are millions of Jews living happy peaceful lives throughout the world beyond the Middle East and there are many more millions of Muslims doing exactly the same thing. The Jews have no monopoly on the proper ‘live and let live’ attitude in multi-ethic and multi-religious communities. I think that part of the meaning of the term ‘modern state’ is that it is not strongly aligned with a particular religion. This is not the only or main reason that the Haredi reject Zionism; for them, Zionism is a poisonous and late development in the history of European Jewry.
The MSM are strangely quiet about the actual and potential deaths from the missiles that Hamas has been raining down on innocent Israeli citizens for years with the harm from such attacks being minimised by the Israeli IronDome system. A nation can take so much, but eventually they have to put a stop to aggression against them.
Very scarce mention of the few hundred thousand Israeli families displaced from their south and north border towns, and the sudden unplanned shutdown of businesses for military mobilisation. Mourning and burials have had to be delayed well past the one or two days required by the religion because remains couldn’t be identified, and the need for forensic autopsies to collect evidence for war crime cases.
Australian cricketer Khawaja wore shoes sporting the slogans “Freedom is a human right” and “All lives are equal” at the Australia team’s main training session on Tuesday.
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My comment to The Australian was, as expected, rejected:
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“Hitler’s and Mother Teresa’s lives were not even close to equal”.
Yawn.
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I don’t agree with politicizing sport but given that boat sailed some time ago, in about 1980 if I remember correctly, what could be less objectionable than ‘all lives are equal’ as a slogan? Even if not strictly true it’s a laudable sentiment. I’d have a lot more respect for CA’s decision if they hadn’t been encouraging the whole team in performative obeisance to the BLM garbage just the other day.
Daryl McCann, an excellent analysis.
Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Moussa Abu Marzuk and Khaled Mashal live in Qatar in 6 star luxury, as billionaires, on Western aid money.
Hamas contructs 500 km of terror tunnels using Western aid money.
Hamas uses Gaza citizens as human shields.
Hamas contravened on 7 October, almost every article of the, ‘Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War’.
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The Western Left is delusional.
Everything Hamas says is a fabricated lie which can be ignored.
Exhibit A : Statistics from the Gaza Ministry of Health (sic).
Exhibits B, C : etc
other than this definitive statement, which can not be ignored.
Exhibit J : The Hamas Charter > “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws.”
Daryl McCann writes “..we cannot blame ordinary sane Muslims for 9/11 or October 7…..” but how many ‘ordinary, sane Muslims’ are there and how many were prepared to openly condemn the Hamas’ atrocities and intentions? How many ordinary, sane Germans went along with the Nazi reign of terror all those years ago? We know how that ended but it was achieved at a huge price.
Ultimately, we have to wake up as a society that we are sleep-walking to disaster as we shelter Islamists in our midst, people as we saw are only to ready to attack Australians, in this case, Jews in our cities. Dutton was on the right track in calling for visas to be cancelled for any of these protestors guilty of hate crimes but radical curbing of immigration of all Muslims has to be brought about.
Islamic beliefs in Australia
https://islamicbeliefsinaustralia.wordpress.com/
In this piece by Daryl McCann, Quadrant continues its remarkably one-sided propaganda barrage in support of the hundred years war waged on the Palestinian people by international Zionism. Contrary to the simple-minded suggestion conveyed by the title, that conflict did not begin on October 7th. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hundred_Years%27_War_on_Palestine
Even McCann’s description of the events of that day as “the slaughter of more than 1400 civilians” by Hamas fighters is an outright fabrication. Many of the Israeli casualties were soldiers and a considerable number of those, together with a great many civilians, were victims of “friendly fire” from the IDF itself: https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/21/haaretz-grayzone-conspiracy-israeli-festivalgoers/
Even more astonishing is McCann’s attempt to downplay the war crimes committed by the IDF in the more than two months since October 7th in his reference to “the inadvertent deaths of Gazan civilians from the IDF’s Operation Swords of Iron.” According to John Mearsheimer: “What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose.” Mearsheimer has no doubt that Israel is “purposely…murdering huge numbers of civilians.”
As he watches “this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold,” Mearsheimer is “left with one simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden administration: have you no decency?” https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza
Mearsheimer and grayzone – a combination guaranteed to reduce the total sum of human knowledge.
Well, it seems that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has answered Mearsheimer’s question as to whether Israel’s military leadership has a sense of decency in the negative:
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2023-12-12/ty-article/.premium/graphic-videos-and-incitement-how-the-idf-is-misleading-israelis-on-telegram/0000018c-5ab5-df2f-adac-febd01c30000
Graphic Videos and Incitement: How the IDF Is Misleading Israelis on Telegram (archived)
The IDF unit responsible for psychological warfare operations operates a Telegram channel called ’72 Virgins – Uncensored,’ which targets local audiences with ‘exclusive content from the Gaza Strip’
The channel, which boasts of “exclusive content from the Gaza Strip” and has published over 700 posts, images and videos of terrorists being killed and of destruction in the Strip, encourages its 5,300 followers to share the content so that “everyone can see that we’re screwing them.”
The Israel Defense Forces denies that it operates the channel, but a senior military official confirmed to Haaretz that the army is responsible for operating it. “There is no reason for the IDF to conduct influence campaigns on Israeli citizens of Israel,” said the official, who requested anonymity. “The messages there are problematic. It doesn’t look like an awareness campaign of an army like the IDF, but more like talking points for [far-right rapper] The Shadow, and the fact that soldiers operate such a problematic page is egregious,” he said.
The channel was created October 9, two days after the war began, as The Avengers. The next day the name was changed to Azazel, echoing the Hebrew pronunciation of “Gaza” and a word for hell, and then 72 Virgins – Uncensored. An October 11 post read: “Burning their mother … You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear the crunch of their bones. We’ll upload it right away, get ready.” Images of Palestinian captives and the bodies of terrorists were captioned “Exterminating the roaches … exterminating the Hamas rats. … Share this beauty.” The following text accompanies a video of an Israeli soldier allegedly dipping machine gun bullets in pork fat: “What a man!!!!! Lubricates bullets with lard. You won’t get your virgins.” And: “Garbage juice!!!! Another dead terrorist!! You have to watch it with the sound, you’ll die laughing.”
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You have obviously not read the Grayzone article you link to with any attention. It cites an article in Haaretz, Israel’s version of the Guardian, which in turn cites an anonymous source. Hardly a basis for your breathless assertion of an “outright fabrication”.
Max Blumenthal, the editor of Grayzone, who wrote this piece, also writes for RT and Press TV, the Iranian government’s repulsive propaganda channel.
You need to be a bit more discerning.
Sindri,
A pathetic response to a high-level content researched valid contribution.
And
Yes Quadrant should at least make space for intellectually sound alternative views.
Feiko,
I have stated very clearly:
– why the Grayzone article the original poster linked to provides no basis for his assertion that the figure referred to by Daryl is an “outright fabrication”;
– why what Max Blumenthal writes should be approached with caution; you may of course think that the fact that he contributes to RT and Press TV is of no moment. Good for you. Vive la difference.
You on the other hand have not answered either of those points, but rather just described my post as “pathetic”.
As for Quadrant “making space for intellectually sound alternative views”, I haven’t suggested otherwise.
Quadrant has made space for the views of Andrew Fraser and Feiko Bouman, so I take “Quadrant should at least make space for intellectually sound alternative views” to imply that, in Feiko Bouman’s opinion, those published views don’t fit that criterion.
EOC from me.
Why would you say this about Mearsheimer?
Is it this complicated? It is when Western opinion writers try to reframe the issue to fit a Western mindset and then try to bothsides the conflict and invent another version of Western two-islams. As both Erdogan and Mahathir had said there is just one Islam. Just because the West is post religious doesn’t mean the Middle East is.
Mohammed’s family structire had seen him raised by various relatives which left him psychologically insecure. As an adult he had a psychic experience (like many can and do have) and told his sister who was somewhat familiar with Christian sects and Diaspora Jews in Arabia and their prophets. She said he must be one of these prophets and told him go to that Jewish settlement and announce himself. He did. Jews were rather finicky about prophets and told him to get lost. That rejection cut deeply into his insecure psyche, as rejection did with that young school sports coach a few months back, and years later Mo returned with a war party and killed all the male Jews and enslaving the women. Moslems to this day and forever into the future are duty bound to emulate his explempary behaviour of enmity towards Jews. That’s the basis of Moslem behaviour. Quite simple in contrast with Darryl’s complicated projections.
As to what Oct 7th represents Hamas itself was simply direct. It struck Israel and Jews on account of the move being made by Jews in the government to build a 3rd Temple on Temple Mount and demonstrations by Jews on that site. Moslems see this as a move to demolish their al Asqa mosque, which they hold to be a sacred site. It is a religious war plain and simple by Muslims against Jews (but then against all filthy infidels to be sure).
The ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM! For too long, apologists for Islam have distorted the facts and hidden the truth. This is creating unnecessary dangers for Australian society and societies around the world. Apologists seem blind to the dangers or have other agendas. The public must be told the facts.
Apologists too readily name attacks by Muslims as terrorist acts, or try to excuse the attacks by suggesting the perpetrator was mentally deranged or perhaps was just having a bad day. While these Muslim killers might be causing terror, their motivation is not terror. It is simply to obey the Koran and kill whomsoever they see as culpable infidels or non-believers.
The Koran explicitly instructs Muslims to kill infidels who are acting against Islam (see for example: Surahs al-Baqarah, 2:190-191 and al-Ma`idah, 5:33). Another of many examples is Surah 4:76 that states, “The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan”.
The Koran must be followed by all true Muslims. So-called moderate Muslims may deny this imperative under the concept of al-Taqiyya (obfuscating or lying to protect themselves or the faith). However, when push comes to shove, they will act as the Koran demands. To act otherwise would label them as hypocrites in the eyes of true Muslims. (The Koran, Surah 4.89, demands that Muslims “not befriend hypocrites and, unless they repent, they are to be killed wherever they are to be found”.)
Islam is not a religion of peace, as is evidenced clearly in the Koran. The earlier verses are peaceful and exemplify tolerance towards those who do not follow Islam. However, Muslims understand that the later verses, which came after Mohammed migrated to Medina, supersede the earlier verses. The later verses reflect prejudice, intolerance, and endorse violence upon unbelievers.
We should not ignore what appears to be a justified concern that Islamists do have a long-term agenda to make a brave new world of peace/theocratic totalitarianism; that is, to make the world Islamic. There was a Muslim cleric in Melbourne many years ago who was reported in the press as saying that Muslims can bide their time because they breed prolifically and, in time, will dominate politics and will then be able to make Australia Islamic.
Agree with Jack Brown and lhackett01
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There is no such thing as a moderate Muslim. Of course, there are ‘Muslims In Name Only – MINOS’. But the following must be understood:- Islam is Mohamed, Islam has never changed, Islam will never change. To change Islam, you would have to take Mohammed out of it and then it wouldn’t be Islam any more. And today, which group is STILL calling for the death of ALL kaffirs/ infidels/non-believers including Israelis and Americans? ONLY the death cult of Islam whose aim is to enforce world-wide sharia Islamic law and the global formation of a violent, jihadi, Islamic caliphate.
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There must be no more ceasefires to appease the pro-Islamic propagandists whose mantra is, “Death to Israel; Death to America; Kill the kaffirs/ infidels/ unbelievers/ Christians; From the river to the sea; Gas the Jews; Annihilate the State of Israel; Genocide against the Jewish people etc”
The IDF must finish their mammoth task of taking out the Hamas savages in Gaza and The West Bank. The IDF MUST take control of Gaza and The West Bank. They must never ever return control to the Hamas savages or any other brand of Islamist who all must adhere to the murderous teachings of Muhammad.
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We must not forget that Israel is a small landmass compared to the whole of the mostly Islamic Middle East. Israel is only about 8,400 square miles, the Middle East is about 5,000,000 square miles. Also, the Islamic population is about 315,000,000 compared to the Israeli population which is only about 7,100,000.
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As around 90% of the population of Gaza and The West Bank is Muslim, a solution must be worked out whereby ALL the Islamists in those areas are relocated into one of the many Islamic countries occupying that 5,000,000 square miles in every direction outside the borders of Gaza, The West Bank and Israel. This move is imperative because there will never be peace while Islamists are co-habiting with Israelis or any other individuals of any other creed or culture.
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The presence of the Al-Aqsa mosque is in the West Bank should not hinder the IDF taking over control of the West Bank. Remember that mosque was built on the Temple Mount where a Jewish Temple was once sited. Also, we must not forget, that worldwide, millions of churches, temples etc are being destroyed or taken over by the Islamists.
https://organiser.org/2021/04/11/24845/bharat/wave-of-islamization-turning-churches-into-mosques-in-the-west/
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It is certainly time to stop the advance of the Islamists, whose population is EXPLODING, and their worldwide takeover of the FREE world.
Alan Deshowitz debates Norman Finkelstein with Piers Morgan “moderating”.
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https://youtu.be/uHqs15gOv4k
Kevin Donnelly writes:
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One lesson arising from the war in Gaza is the need to better educate young Australians about religion.
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https://todayspaper.dailytelegraph.com.au/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=7574337c-ed7e-48da-be65-bf73187e0c86&share=true
They are thoroughly versed in the tenets, if not the origins, of our new state religion of unbounded liberalism, itself a heretical atheistic offshoot of Christianity, minus any of the transcendence. There are two classes of adherents: oppressors and victims. It’s fairly clear by now which race ( just a social construct), sex ( not biologically determined ) and deviance ( there’s no such thing as this ) combinations belong in each category.
Thanks very much for this link Loveday.
It captures in a nutshell some key arguments of a hard peacenik and a hard warmonger.
And in my view, Finkelstein’s argument is much stronger and his sentiments are much more admirable.
Deshowitz and the rest of the Jews and Christians in the American Israel lobby have an interest in the continuation of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – this violent conflict is the basis of much of the multi-billion dollar arms and defence industries in America.
Excellent analysis but what is the Israeli end game? The only one that makes any sense given the ongoing Israeli destruction is the total depopulation of Gaza with surviving Palestinian refugees escaping to Jordan, Egypt or anywhere that will take them. The 7th October attacks required retaliation. To incorporate the destruction of Hamas in that retaliation creates a major dilemma. Hamas is tangible but it is, when all is said and done, just another representation of an idea. That idea being the spread of Islam by violence. The ideals of Hamas or its iterations will never be destroyed by violence. It’s Whack A Mole. The ongoing killing of civilian families and children is creating more martyrs and is falling into the trap set by jihadist recruiters who are using Gazans as bait to attract the next crop of zealots and suicide bombers. Surely the much touted but obviously flawed Mossad could’ve infiltrated Hamas and dispatched its leadership without risking more Israeli soldiers and rocket targeted civilian lives rather than alienate Israel’s traditional global supporters. While many on here decry the concept of climate change I suspect that in the long run the end of oil as a major energy source will see the drying up of funds backing Jihadist movements such as Hamas and then maybe a permanent peace will ensue.
Ethnic cleaning in clear sight is occurring this minute in Gaza .
Israel is methodically destroying the residents of the Gaza Palestinians so they have nothing to go back to .The Israeli pilots are all knowingly mass murderers of children no spin on on this forum can deny that fact .Terrorise by pushing the Palestinians from one place to another while indiscriminately bombing .
Israel will never recover from this war crime .
The USA crying crocodile tears about what Israel is doing while supplying them on an emergency basis the arms and ammunition to do it .
It’s the same standard of war undertaken since the advent of urban terror bombing in the 1930s. Millions of civilians have died, predominantly under US bombardment. Whilst the Palestinian deaths remain statistics, rather than media-elaborated human tragedies, I don’t believe Israel will be unduly affected.
Overwhelming military power is deeply corrupting .
We have seen it in the genocides of the past and we are seeing it now .
Once the full body count of the civilian Palestinians and especially the children is tallied up and the scale of the destruction of their housing and infrastructure is realised there will be Roar of outrage in the West .
I believe that Israel will be greatly affected .
In this multimedia world what has happened won’t just remain statistics in spite of the propaganda media onslaught that Israel has unleashed .
Yet another ‘useful idiot’.
I agree, CK. It’s incredible how many people in here equate Israel’s quite reasonable and legitimate defensive response to the Oct 7 outrage as “war crimes” and “genocide”. Like most of the “pro-Palestinian” campaigners, not one of these “useful idiots” has bothered to analyse or even to acknowledge the bestiality of the Hamas attackers who have gone to the trouble to publicise their atrocities by providing their own body camera footage to western news media. Thus, they have provided their own incontrovertible proof of their crimes that so many anti-Semitic “journalists” (like our own ABC’s) have claimed not to have existed. Nor do they acknowledge Hamas’s declared intention to kill all Israeli Jews.
They refuse to acknowledge the well-known fact that Hamas and other Islamist terror organisations habitually fight behind their own civilians making it virtually impossible for Israel to avoid civilian casualties despite warning that attacks are about to happen. The absolute nadir of nonsensical commentary in this thread was the assertion that Israeli fighter pilots are committing war crimes by deliberately murdering civilians.
Leaving aside all such drivel, would those critics of Israel’s actions please advise exactly how they would deal with the situation.
Put up or shut up.