Victor Davis Hanson: Hamas Relies on ‘Useful Western Idiots’ for Sympathy, Backlash in U.S. ‘Ensures’ GOP Victory
Well, so far, so outrageous. The administration has placed Strauss on administrative leave, requiring him to teach his courses remotely for the rest of the semester (fortunately, the semester has only a few more weeks to run). This decision was taken without allowing him to present his version of events. And the pro-Hamas students have done still worse: they have deliberately misrepresented what he said, so that it appears that he was denouncing, and wishing death upon, all Palestinians and not Hamas alone. But he was quite clear in his condemnation: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one [of them] should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
This time around, Arab nations are allegedly pressuring Israel to destroy Hamas
One of the things I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen is that the most interesting thing about the current war between Israel and Hamas is that the surrounding Sunni Arab nations are staying out of it. This observation may be meaningful, for Haaretz has reported that not only are the Sunni Arabs staying out of the war, but they are also encouraging Israel to finish what she started. This is great news if only Biden doesn’t undermine this excellent situation.
Here in America, we know that Democrats are now the party of antisemitism, something that Democrat Jews are only slowly realizing. It’s in Democrat enclaves—e.g., big cities, academia, the White House, the State Department, and the CIA—that rampant Israel hatred, a mere variant of antisemitism, is making itself known.
Biden is paying lip service to supporting Israel, but the ceasefire he bullied Israel into only benefitted Hamas because Israel lost momentum and Hamas was able to regroup. Even worse, as Caroline Glick reports, Israel has no ability to push back against Biden’s pressure because Biden holds the keys to Israel’s armory.
Without America, Israel has no weapons. All her systems integrated with American-supplied ammunition. Even after the Obama administration made plain that Israel could not count on having a friend in the White House, Israel didn’t or couldn’t disengage from her dependence on America’s defense contractors. For that reason, Biden is now effectively managing Israel’s war…and he is, as I said, no friend to Israel.
Image: Gazan protesters in 2018. YouTube screen grab.
That’s depressing but, on the bright side, Israel’s Sunni Arab neighbors have been strangely passive. It turns out that, according to a Haaretz report from a couple of days ago, before Hamas broke the ceasefire and Israel reengaged in battle, this passivity is because they are as anxious as Israel is to see Hamas destroyed. The Haaretz report is behind a paywall, but this is the gist:
There are rumors that Qatar, which is headquarters for Hamas’s billionaire leaders, has been trying to broker a cease-fire that would see Hamas release its hostages in exchange for Israel releasing every single tried-and-convicted Gazan and West Bankians in its prisons. Of course, it’s worth noting that, while the hostages are women and children, the people in Israel’s prisons ended up there for attempted murder. Moreover, Omri Ceren believes some have been too badly tortured to be released.
The Qatar plan, if real, is a terrible deal for Israel. To drive home how bad it is, remember that Yahya Sinwar, who masterminded the October 7 attack, was one of those released many years ago in exchange for Gilad Shalit, the Israel soldier that Hamas had kidnapped. Now, Sinwar is saying that “October 7 was just a rehearsal” and that his goal is Israel’s “annihilation.” He is the essence of evil, and those who support Hamas have no moral excuse for doing so.
Fortunately, so far, it’s unlikely that the Israeli people will support a deal of the kind Qatar is allegedly trying to broker. For them, it would be like finding you have a deadly tumor and starting surgery to remove it. Then, halfway through the surgery, with only part of the tumor removed, the surgeon not only closes you up but also gives you vitamins that, rather than strengthening you, feed the remainder of the tumor.
Haaretz claims that Israelis aren’t the only ones opposed to this deal. According to the article, even as countries like Egypt and Jordan make the usual noises about Israel being the bad guy in all this, talks behind the scenes are quite different. In those talks, “almost every leader in the region, including in most of the Gulf states, is urging Israel to end the war only after Hamas is defeated, since they view the organization as a dangerous domestic enemy.”
That contention is entirely believable. Every nation that’s ever taken in people from Gaza and the West Bank has come to regret it. Gaza and the West Bank don’t produce productive citizens. They produce people who are completely dependent on government largesse and whose only skill is protest and revolution.
In the Book of Exodus, after the Jews left Egypt, God didn’t want people who had been conditioned to be slaves to enter the land of Israel. Instead, He consigned them to 40 years in the desert so that the old generation would die before the new generation entered the Promised Land.
In the case of the Gazans, we have a people conditioned for either dependency or violence, and there’s no desert in which to put them. The Sunni nations don’t want them, so they’re hoping that Israel will do the dirty work of destroying their worst elements and bringing the rest of the population to heel—just as the Allies did with the Germans and Nazis during and after WWII.
Victor Davis Hanson: Hamas Relies on ‘Useful Western Idiots’ for Sympathy, Backlash in U.S. ‘Ensures’ GOP Victory
The Hamas “death cult” relies on “useful Western idiots” to support the Palestinian cause, which has “fused with the leftwing DEI industry,” according to world-renowned military historian and professor Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, who notes that pro-Palestinian protests and support for Hamas in the U.S. have alienated many Americans and will all but ensure a tough conservative president in 2024.
Consequently, he explains, Hamas has become “the Middle-East counterpart to BLM… and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement,” while Israelis are “recalibrated as the demonized Western ‘colonialist’ white supremacists.”
In an essay published this week titled “What Were the Hamas Monsters Thinking?,” Dr. Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, describes the strategies and motivations behind Hamas’s “monstrous” actions on October 7.
Hamas’s Barbarism
The U.S.-designated terrorist group’s massacre in Israel last month — the deadliest against Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust — saw the torture, rape, execution, immolation, and abduction of hundreds of Israelis of all ages, mostly civilians, and dozens of Americans.
Thousands of others were injured and mutilated.
In light of their “eagerness to commit the unspeakable,” Hamas members aimed to shock the world with extreme brutality, believing the group would force Israeli concessions, the essay notes.
“In precivilization fashion, [Hamas] wished to kill and mutilate the most vulnerable of all Israeli civilians and thus to shock the world that it was capable of — and proud about — anything, from decapitation to necrophilia,” Hanson writes.
“Such animalistic savagery, in the reckoning of Western therapeutic society, was supposedly to be seen as forced upon Hamas murderers by the ‘occupation,’” he adds.
In addition to provoking an Israeli response leading to collateral damage, Hanson suggests Hamas aimed to “terrify the entire civilian population” and prove that “2,000 killers could enter sacred Israeli ground with impunity and kill in one day more Jews civilians than at any day since the Holocaust.”
Knowing its methods and ultimate goals, the famed historian questioned why the terror group would “think the civilized world would support their barbarity or at least excuse it.”
Western Perceptions and Institutions
According to Hanson, Hamas banked on Jew-hatred in the West and the Middle East, believing its actions against the Jewish state would garner sympathy and support.
“Hamas assumed anti-Semitism was prevalent throughout the West and was canonical in the Middle East,” he writes. “Palestinian authorities count on the fact that being an enemy of the Jews of Israel wins them empathy of the world and creating their own unique rules of passive-aggressive victimhood.”
“So Palestinians demand to be the only ‘refugees’ in the world — not Greek Cypriots, Eastern European Germans, and Prussians, Kurds, Armenians, and certainly not a million Jews cleansed from the Arab Middle East,” he adds.
He also notes that from such a perspective, Israelis are to be regarded as “settlers,” as opposed to the “millions of Middle Easterners who surge and settle into the West, form resistance communities, sneer at integration and assimilation, and use Western liberality to protect and project their own illiberality.”
As Hanson points out, Hamas also counted on Western institutions and puppets, aligning its cause with activist groups on the left to gain support.
“Hamas relies on useful Western idiots. It understands its terrorists repel the majority of Americans. But it figures Western and globalist institutions — academia, the media, popular culture — in their wealth, ignorance, and self-importance, alleviate guilt and find resonance by mouthing the shibboleths of the ‘underdog,’” he writes.
He also highlights Hamas’s strategy in grasping that “the Palestinian cause has fused with the leftwing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry.”
“Thus Hamas becomes the Middle-East counterpart to BLM, aggrieved minorities, and, more preposterously, the trans/gay/feminist movement. Meanwhile, Israelis are recalibrated as the demonized Western ‘colonialist’ white supremacists,” he notes.
The essay posits that Hamas also believed that Middle Eastern expatriates in the West would view Western tolerance as weakness and manipulate it for its ends:
[T]he Islamic expatriate populations of Europe and the U.S. have soared. In the strange logic of the Middle Easterner in the West — on a green card, or a student visa, or either as an illegal alien or a first-generation immigrant — he will envision the magnanimity of Americans and Europeans who offered him refuge from the violence, hatred, tyranny, racism, sexism, terrorism, and violence of his homeland all too often as weakness to be manipulated, not as generosity to be appreciated much less reciprocated.
“Middle Eastern expatriates brag of their growing numbers and the political clout that Islam accrues in liberal democracies, without a clue of their hypocrisy of supporting illiberal tyrannies whose violence drove them out to the West in the first place,” he added.
Observing their recent radical actions in America, Hanson describes watching Middle Easterners in the U.S. “trying to ruin iconic events such as crashing ‘Black Friday’ shopping, disrupting the New York Thanksgiving parade, or tearing down American flags on Veterans’ Day.”
“Only in America would the Iranian terrorist theocracy’s ex-ambassador to the UN, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, be accorded a professorship at Oberlin or a former top diplomat for the Iranian regime Seyed Hossein Mousavian land a coveted billet at Princeton,” he writes.
Highlighting the use of Western freedoms by expatriates to further radical agendas, Hanson declares that from “such perches” these expatriates are “free to promote pro-Hamas, Iranian, anti-Semitic — and Anti-American — agendas,” adding that they “consider their hosts not so much tolerant as stupid.”
Fear and Terror
Another strategy used by Hamas was the threat of terrorism, reminiscent of events like the September 11 attacks on U.S. soil, to intimidate the West into opposing Israel.
“[B]ehind all these considerations, is the reality of terrorism and the fear it instills in the West, given the 21st century history of Middle Easterners slaughtering thousands of Americans and Europeans,” he writes. “In crude terms, Hamas and its terrorist affiliates signal us, ‘damn Israel or be prepared for another 9/11.’”
He also points to how Hamas, who he describes as a “death cult” and “updated terrorist version of the more organized SS — with the qualifier it broadcasts rather than hides its savagery,” uses tactics including using human shields and targeting civilians, expecting Israel’s reluctance to reciprocate in kind.
“Radical Palestinians brag that they love death more than Israel loves life,” he writes. “So they count on Israel giving up three convicted terrorists for one elderly or young captive, on targeting civilians with rockets while Israelis drops leaflets warning of their bombing attacks, on coercing human shields that they assume Israel will avoid, on sanctioning raping, mutilating, and beheading in a way Israel would never conceive of reciprocating in kind, and on and on.”
Despite any support for Hamas emanating from the UN and the media, Hanson argues that the terror group’s tactical and strategic methods will likely not work this time.
“October 7 was a declaration by Hamas that all barbarity imaginable was now fair game. Yet its sheer evil has unleashed the IDF that perhaps not even Joe Biden, hostages, and ‘world opinion’ can permanently stop,” he writes.
“For all the boasts about loving death, it was Hamas who cowardly murdered the unarmed, scampered back to the safety of their tunnels, and used their own kindred Gazans to shield them from death—delivered to them by supposed nerds who love life too much,” he added.
European Reaction to Immigration
According to Hanson, the actions of Hamas and its supporters are causing a shift in European attitudes towards Middle Eastern immigration, with increasing public resentment, stating that “Europeans also have had it with unlimited immigration from the Middle East.”
The popularity of “restrictionist politicians throughout Europe” as seen in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Sweden, he argues, “reflect[s] growing public anger that Europeans are hated by the very people who seek them out and wish to destroy their Enlightenment institutions by manipulating and discrediting them.”
“The thousands who hit the streets to cheer on October 7 and damn their hosts only confirm a growing global consensus—in the West, Latin America, Asia, and even throughout the Middle East—that admitting migrants from Palestine or Gaza, or their supporters, is a veritable death wish,” he added.
Impact on U.S. Politics
Hanson also argues that pro-Hamas activities in the U.S., including disruptive protests like the attempt to impede the much beloved Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree lighting on Wednesday night, are alienating many Americans and could influence future political decisions:
Pro-Hamas protestors calling Joe Biden ‘Genocide Joe’ and boasting about the Arab or Muslim vote in Michigan is incoherent. Not only do harassing Thanksgiving shoppers and parades, disrupting iconic American holidays and events, swarming highways and bridges, and preying on Jews alienate Americans. But also taking credit for ensuring Biden’s defeat will only distance the Democratic establishment, such as it is, from its embarrassing, loud, but ultimately relatively impotent Islamic constituency.
“Shouting for mass death ‘From the River to the Sea’ does not endear the pro-Hamas crowd to half of their fellow Democrats, much less unabashedly strutting their anti-Semitism,” he adds. “The current overt support for Hamas, in other words, has revealed to the nation the bankruptcy of the entire pro-Hamas/DEI base of the Democratic Party and will do much to ensure a conservative president in 2024.”
That Commander-in-Chief, Hanson asserts, “will likely deport anyone on a green card or student visa promoting Hamas terrorism, or violating U.S. law, while ensuring a travel ban from terrorist supporting regimes in the Middle East.”
“Such measures will win overwhelming public support, despite media and academic outrage,” he adds.
Long-term Implications
The piece goes on to suggest that, while “for now Hamas and its American-residing apologists are full of themselves and feel they are leveraging and manipulating the West,” the terror group’s actions and the reactions of its supporters in the West may ultimately harm the Palestinian cause and Middle Eastern immigration to the West, arguing that “such haughtiness may be a delusion.”
“Hamas in the Middle East and its enablers in Europe and America have done more to harm the Palestinian cause and the idea of Middle Eastern immigration to the West than at any time since 9/11,” he writes.
While it is “hard to anger Westerners,” Hanson maintains, if supporters of the Palestinians “continue the death chants, the violent demonstrations, the creepy anti-Semitism, and the proud support for the Hamas bloodwork of October 7,” then they will “be surprised at the growing anger of otherwise postmodern Europeans and distracted Americans.”
Regarding the challenges faced by Israel and the West, the article concludes by noting that just as Israel “realizes that there is no living with Hamas killers,” so too the West is “learning that it can no longer sustain universities that despise the culture that nourishes it or Middle Eastern immigrants, visiting students, and residents that use the gift of freedom and tolerance to promote their abhorrent anti-Semitism, violence, intolerance — and, yes, hatred of their generous hosts.”
Following the October 7 massacre, Hanson slammed the Hamas “SS murderers,” while accusing the Biden administration of bolstering the terror group, and calling on Americans to demand “not one more American cent” be transferred to the Palestinians.
He also insisted that Hamas’s unprecedented invasion of Israel would in “no way” have transpired under the presidency of Donald Trump, as he urged America to take back its international standing.
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jklein@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
Muslims from swing states descended on Michigan on Saturday to issue a call to voters to “#AbandonBiden” over his support for Israel.
Though the Biden administration has been vocal in recent weeks in its criticisms of Israel’s plans to defeat the Palestinian terror group Hamas, and has pushed for more humanitarian aid to the Gaza, many in the Arab- and Muslim-American community are angry that the White House has supported Israel at all, and are vowing to punish Biden at the ballot box in 2024.
Politico reported:
Muslim leaders from several swing states on Saturday descended on Dearborn, Michigan, to launch a national campaign against the reelection of President Joe Biden — a response to his handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Organizers from Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania are calling the campaign #AbandonBiden, vowing to ensure that Biden is a one-term president. These leaders have run separate pressure campaigns in their respective states, members of the coalition said, but they felt now was the time to coordinate their response ahead of the 2024 election.
…
The leaders said Saturday they are not voting for Donald Trump next year, though they recognized that their effort to rally support against Biden could elevate the former president. They said they’ll continue to have discussions as a community about which candidate to throw their support behind as the primaries rapidly approach.
The prospect of losing votes in swing states does appear to be affecting Biden administration policy, as does a revolt among White House staffers. President Joe Biden has moved from bold statements of support for Israel to more lukewarm stances; he even reportedly apologized to Muslim leaders for questioning Hamas’s official death count for the conflict, which includes terrorists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Tufts University Student Group Honors Palestinian 'Martyrs'—Including Hamas Terrorists Who Died Attacking Israel
School’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter praised 'creativity' of Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack
A Tufts University student group on Wednesday unveiled a campus display honoring the names of Palestinian "martyrs"—including known Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists who died while attacking Israeli soldiers.
The school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter shared photos of the "glory to our martyrs" display, which included the names and ages of Palestinians whom the group suggested were unjustly killed. One such "martyr," Ahmed Amer Salim Abu Junaid, was killed in a January "confrontation with the Zionist enemy army," according to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a designated terror group that claimed Abu Junaid as one of its own after his death.
Another honoree, Youssef Shreim, was a member of Hamas's al-Qassam Brigades, the terrorist wing that spearheaded Hamas's Oct. 7 assault on the Jewish state. Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts also featured on their display Ezzedine Bassem Hamamreh, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad member who died during a January firefight with Israeli troops.
Anti-Semitic demonstrators on American college campuses have regularly chanted and displayed the phrase "glory to our martyrs." At George Washington University, for example, the school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter projected the slogan onto a campus building in an unauthorized display. At least one professor at the university defended the stunt, arguing in a Nov. 17 op-ed that "glory to our martyrs" is a reference not to terrorism but to innocent civilians killed in Israel's "bombardment."
The Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts display contradicts that argument. In addition to Abu Junaid, Shreim, and Hamamreh, another "martyr" honored on the display was Saud al-Titi, who died in April while attempting to attack an Israeli military post. Al-Titi before the attempted attack served 15 years in prison, and a local Palestinian militant group he belonged to lauded him as a "resistance martyr" after his death. "We fought as soldiers and we promise we will always be soldiers," al-Titi said in a video following his release from prison.
Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts did not return a request for comment. It's unclear who leads the group—while Tufts student groups are required to submit to the university an annual roster of "organization leaders," the school does not release that information publicly. Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts has worked to shield itself from online scrutiny: It excluded its website from the Internet Archive, which allows users to view archived versions of a site. The group also uses virtual stickers of the Palestinian flag to obscure its members' faces when posting protest photos.
A spokesman for the university—which is known for its substantial Jewish population—said the "glory to our martyrs" campus display is "being reviewed."
"The university has previously made clear that it condemns the terrorism and atrocities that Hamas carried out against Israel on Oct. 7," the Tufts spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon. "We are committed to following our processes regarding this incident, which is being reviewed, and will hold responsible any individual or group found to have violated university policies."
Beyond the "glory to our martyrs" display featuring the names of dead Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists, Students for Justice in Palestine at Tufts also unveiled on Wednesday a large sign that said "Zionist tactics were used to kill George Floyd." The sign featured a drawing of a pig in a police uniform and included the phrase "ACAB," which stands for "all cops are bastards." A third sign called to "end Israeli apartheid."
Two days after Hamas's Oct. 7 assault on Israel, meanwhile, the student group issued a statement celebrating what it called "a historic attack on the colonizers."
"Footage of liberation fighters from Gaza paragliding into occupied territory has especially shown the creativity necessary to take back stolen land," the statement said. "It has not been without cost, as hundreds of Palestinians have been martyred in the past days, fighting to liberate themselves and their land."
The Anti-Defamation League's New England chapter condemned that statement, calling it "obscene."
Nazis, Muslims and the Jews
Did Nazis carry out the horrific Oct 7th massacre?
One of the most accurate aspects about Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is the use of the word Nazi to describe the terrorist enemy. No other label or historical parallel could capture the chilling ferocious madness – but not scope – of Palestinian butchery of Israelis. The Nazi vilification epithet has now become conventional Israeli discourse in public and media circles with the vivid revelation – in words and photos – of Palestinian savagery and barbarism by Hamas on October 7. Hamas terrorists, without an ounce of inhibition or remorse, shot youth in cold blood at the music festival at Re’im, burnt and beheaded Jews, vaunting their sadistic impulses upon children, men, and the elderly – raping women and girls. They decapitated a baby cut from the mother’s womb in front of her eyes. The pyromaniacs set fire to homes, barns and cars.
Nazis and Jews
The murder of approximately 1,200 Israelis in an orgy of bloodshed evoked the sensation that Nazis carried out such a horrific massacre of helpless Jews on that ‘Black Saturday’ on Gaza’s border. Decades of Palestinian terrorism upgraded from stoning and stabbing Jews to the diabolical nightmare of Nazi crematoria – burning Jewish people alive. Later, in a child’s room in Gaza, Israeli soldiers came upon an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s bible. The kidnapping of 241 Israelis to Gaza became an additional chilling chapter of this unparalleled ordeal.
Are the Palestinians Nazis by ideology?
Berl Katznelson, the foremost leader of Labor Zionism until his death in 1944, was a witness to Arab massacres of Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. He referred to “the Palestinian Nazis who succeeded to unite here in [Eretz] Israel the zoological antisemitism of Europe and the lust for the dagger of the Orient.” The connection between Nazis and Palestinians led the esteemed songwriter Naomi Shemer to offer a remarkable insight:
“Arabs like their murder hot, moist, and steamy, and if they will ever be free to fulfill themselves, we [Jews] will yearn for the good sterile gasses of the Germans.”
In Kfar Aza and Be’eri, Nir Oz and Sderot, there was no Palestinian industrialized war machine in operation; rather just primitive hordes of “Muhammad’s monsters”[1] mangling and mutilating Jews whose innocence, in the double sense of the word, became ready prey for the Gazan rabble run wild. To define those Hamas Palestinian as ‘terrorists’ is a gross understatement, perhaps a euphemism.
In Israel today, after the October 7 pogrom, the liberation of language has allowed the use of ‘Nazi’ to describe the horrendous event. During the entire year prior to the pogrom, the leftist street protests against the judicial reform package of the Netanyahu government introduced the odious word – Nazi – specifically targeting Netanyahu himself. Placards portrayed him in a Nazi uniform, the demonization of the prime minister becoming a central axis of the intense brainwashing campaign. The year 1933 became a symbolic benchmark for Netanyahu’s devious dictatorial designs – said the protest.
Of memorable notoriety was ex-general and member of Knesset Yair Golan’s “processes speech” from 2018 that hinted Israel was already adopting Nazi features in its ideological transformation from a democracy to a dictatorship. The end of liberty in Israel was approaching. The leftist-liberal secular camp, unhinged and full of hatred for Netanyahu during the decades of his premiership, had lost its cultural poise and historical judgment.[2] When the Arab Nazis struck and slaughtered in October, the outrageous accusation that the rightist-nationalist camp is Nazi-like paled and dissolved.
The gruesome real Nazis changed the contours of the domestic Israeli dialogue. Now Netanyahu, the would-be Nazi in the furtive imagination of some bewitched Israelis, labeled Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, “a little Hitler hiding in a bunker” on November 5. Here was a candidate worthy of the title.
However, many years earlier, the enemies of Israel from near and far had adopted the Nazi charge against the Jewish state as an ideological staple of de-legitimization. The Russians had initiated this perversion of comparing Zionism to Nazism, and their Syrian proxy followed suit. The loathsome ‘Zionism-is-Nazism’ canard served to vilify Israel and render its existence to be a wicked injustice imposed on the Arabs, Muslims, and the world.[3] This fabricated indictment shaped the victimology of the Palestinians that became a marketable political logo.
Incompatibilities and Conflict: The Primacy of Islam
Islam, the religion of the Muslim faithful, predominates in the political calculus of Hamas (an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement). This turns the Israeli–Palestinian clash into a Muslim–Jewish religious war. In the language of the Hamas covenant from 1988 (Art. 15): “the Palestinian problem is a religious problem” which obligates Muslims to conduct jihad. In Articles 20 and 31 Hamas makes the heinous accusation that Israel uses Nazi methods against the Palestinian people. Where has Israel concealed those death camps and gas ovens? Needless to say that the very victims of Nazism are not the Palestinians but the Jews, then in Europe and now in the Middle East.
It is worth recalling that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) earlier flung the Nazi charge against Israel in its 1964 Charter (Art. 22). This diatribe against Zionism is an incredulous inversion of truth, no less because of the intimate collaboration in World War II between Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader in British-mandated Palestine. The latter’s ideological and nationalist successor, Yasser Arafat, stated in an interview in 1981 that “the Zionist invasion recalled the Nazi invasion” (of Austria, Poland…).[4] Fatah, the core faction in the PLO, and Hamas are of one Palestinian mind.
The religious engine instructing, validating, inspiring, and mobilizing Hamas is, expectedly, the Koran. The book of Allah revealed to the prophet Muhammad guidance in confirming that the only true faith is Islam (3:18), it is above all religions (48:28), and it will conquer or convert the entire world. To “fight for the cause of Allah” (9:111) against “those who do not embrace the true faith” (9:29) is the greatest deed a Muslim can do. The “believers” (Muslims) must confront the “unbelievers” (Jews) and thereby establish truth and justice on earth. Indeed, “ruthlessness toward unbelievers” (48:29), beheading without mercy, is the mark of Islam as a complete religious-political way of life. For hundreds of years Muslim regimes applied restrictions and humiliations against dhimmi Jews (and Christians) in the lands of Islam[5] – similar to Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic legislation, turning Jewish citizens into outcasts and dwarfing their public presence. With the spread of armed radical Islam, militant and triumphalist, Muslims seek nothing less than a resounding victory against the Jewish people.
With an ineluctable mandate from Kitab Allah (The Book of God), no moral restrictions stayed the hand of Hamas savages. Like the Nazis in the 1930s, Hamas was always rearming and preparing for the war it would start. Nazis reviled the godless communists, Hamas reviled godless Fatah – and both saw the Jews as the ultimate and diabolical enemy. Hitler aroused frenzy among the Germans, he whipped up passion and hatred, and the mob would follow him; all this featured in the role of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successors – Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar. In both cases, Germany and Palestine, exultant mass support for the regime as befits totalitarian movements was more essential than the democratic vote that brought them to power.
Hamas cutthroats and murderers assaulted civilian communities and military posts across the Gaza line and slaughtered the Israelis. The spirit of Itbach el-Yahud – “slaughter the Jews” – filled the air. This sacred mission gave life significance and purpose. Twelve hundred dead Israelis and 241 Israeli hostages were a trophy of victory that, when the news of the operation spread, brought the Gazan Palestinians to the streets, joyous at the Jewish blood spilled, and – as is customary – to distribute sweets and candies in celebration. Fatah followers in the West Bank were no less exuberant.
The Hamas plan for war was sophisticated in its tactical maneuvers and deceptive in implementation. In the months prior, Sinwar had avoided provoking Israel, rather conveying his emphasis on economic development for Gaza and shying away from joining the more active terror campaign by Islamic Jihad in Samaria. Netanyahu apparently may have believed that Israel had successfully deterred Hamas from any concerted military campaign. In the German case, until September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, Hitler conducted a disinformation campaign aimed at America, England, and Russia, to conceal his intention to go to war.[6] In the end, Hitler fooled Chamberlain and later Stalin; Sinwar arguably fooled Netanyahu – as Arafat fooled Rabin, not with war but with a peace offensive.
War is at the heart of Islam and conquest is the banner of its glory. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran inspiring, training, arming, and financing Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups, declared in a speech in 1942 that Islam is not a religion of peace. Rather, “Kill them [the non-Muslims] put them to the sword…Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword.”[7] Religious euphoria bonds with the Islamic maxim: Din Muhammad bi’l Saif (the religion of Muhammad by the sword). Khomeini demanded that no one should insult Islam by calling it a religion of peace. His Hamas proxies, bold and ferocious, did not disappoint.
The classic Islamic works – Sirat Rasul Allah and The Sahih Al-Bukhari Anthology – relate the gruesome actions and instructions of Muhammad against enemy forces. They document his war against his own Quraysh tribe, the expulsion of the Bani al-Nadir tribe, and the slaughter of the Bani Qurayza. Mercy, attributed to Allah in the opening Al-Fatiha Koranic verse, was not included in the arsenal of qualities or attributes of Muhammad’s Muslims. A traditional saying commands: “Kill any Jews that fall into your power.” The Hamas Charter (Art. 8) cites the movement’s slogan: “Allah is its target, the prophet is its model, the Koran its constitutions, jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.” In a street rally in Ramallah weeks into the Gaza War, the chant arose: “Whoever has a rifle, shoot a Jew.”[8]
The goal of the Nazis was to kill all the Jews and cleanse Germany of any Jewish presence. The Palestinians are unarguably their true successors and ideological compatriots in the Middle East, fighting to cleanse Israel of all Jews.
Reflections on Gnostic Heresy
The Hamas-Nazi analogy requires a few final reflections. Four distinctive features define the resemblance:
One: they engaged in the dehumanization of the Jews, as vermin (rats and parasitic insects) by the Nazis, and as apes and pigs by Hamas;
Two: they had the singular and obsessive objective of killing Jews more than even victory in war;
Three: they aspired to achieve global conquest in the name of their ideology – Nazism and Islamism – without compromise.
Four: German Nazism emerged in the 1920s with a fervent hatred of Great Britain and saw her as the major strategic rival, so to the Muslim Brotherhood – Hamas’ parent organization – was born in the same decade and saw Britain, with its mandate over Palestine, its Great Power enemy. The shame of the Versailles Treaty for Germany compared with the humiliation of the Balfour Declaration for the Arabs.
Germans and Palestinians acted under a mysterious spell, they did things out-of-the-ordinary in a conflictual-military context. They burnt Jews alive, and Hamas in earlier years conjured up the holocaust “still to come upon the Jews.”[9] A primordial force operated in such cultures dedicated to domination but also destruction, the perpetrators never blaming themselves. They do not countenance the possibility of error. The Nazi truth and the Hamas truth are unassailable: the faithful ask no questions. Hitler youth in Germany and Islamic youth in Palestine receive an education that prepared them to sacrifice, murder, and die.[10] Anointed to rule with a mission to launch a new era, Nazism and Islamism set forth to build a new world.
Only with such language and interpretation can we begin to grasp the violent nightmares that these diabolical gnostic forces imposed on their Jewish victims, and the world.[11] Hitler’s declaration of the Thousand Year Reich, and Islam’s belief in the Coming of the Mahdi or the Day of Judgment, make possible and permit every conceivable monstrosity.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan taught Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Notes:
[1] The title of a book edited by David Bukay, Muhammad’s Monsters, Green Forest, Arkansas: Balfour Books, 2004.
[2] See my book The Crack-up of the Israeli Left, Canada: Mantua Books, 2019.
[3] Robert S. Wistrich, “Islamic Judeophobia: An Existential Threat,” in Muhammad’s Monsters, pp. 195-219.
[4] “A Discussion with Yasser Arafat,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 42, Winter 1982, pp. 4-5.
[5] Bat Ye’or, “Dhimmi Peoples – Oppressed Nations,” in Robert Spencer, ed., The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2004, chapter 6, pp. 115-146. For most purposes, the Islamic diatribes against Jews are also against the Christians.
[6] See William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Pub., 1960, chapters 14-16.
[7] In Andrew G. Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Jihad, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, p. 226.
[8] The source is Palestinian Media Watch, Nov. 11, 2023.
[9] Markos Zographos, Genocidal Antisemitism: A Core Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, Occasional Paper Series, no. 4, 2001, Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, p. 41.
[10] Rafael Medoff, “Hitler Youth in Gaza,” Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Nov. 17, 2023.
[11] See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952, chapter VI, on the phenomenon of gnosticism in politics.
Reader Interactions
USC Professor Denounces Hamas Nazis, Now He’s on Administrative Leave
Because he expressed disapproval of torturers, rapists and sadistic mass murderers.
John Strauss is a tenured professor of economics at the University of Southern California. Crossing the campus in late November, he came across a pro-Hamas demonstration. Being pro-Israel, he proclaimed aloud his hatred for Hamas, the group whose operatives on October 7 beheaded babies, burned children alive, tortured and raped young girls, gouged out eyes, sliced off breasts, and cut off the genitalia of Israelis, both before and after death, murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on what happened to Professor Strauss after he made his remarks, can be found here: “Jewish USC professor barred from campus after criticizing Hamas,” Israel National News, November 22, 2023:
The University of Southern California has banned a Jewish professor with tenure from teaching on campus for the rest of the semester for criticizing the Hamas terrorist organization.
Economics Professor John Strauss confronted anti-Israel demonstrators during a “Shut it Down for Palestine” protest on the USC campus on November 9.
The demonstrators accused Strauss of stepping on a list of people killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and yelled “shame on you, Professor Strauss, shame on you.”
The professor responded: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
The pro-Hamas students, determined to get Professor Strauss in trouble, posted a misleading clip that left out Strauss’ denunciation of Hamas, making it appear that he was calling for the death of all the Palestinians. So he was made to say “Everyone [of you] should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
About a dozen students complained to the university administration and claimed that Strauss threatened them. The next day, the associate dean called Strauss and told him he was being placed on administrative leave would only be allowed to teach his courses remotely for the rest of the semester.
Do you think a lone professor would have “threatened” dozens of angry pro-Palestinian students physically? How likely is that? What was the nature of that supposed threat made by Professor Strauss? And after a dozen of those students made their claim to the administration, why was it that the very next day, without even talking to Professor Strauss to hear his version of events — whatever happened to due process? — he was placed on administrative leave for the rest of the semester? Shouldn’t there have been an investigation into what Strauss said, rather than immediate acceptance of what those students claimed?
Strauss said in an interview with USC Annenberg Media that his comments were misrepresented to portray him as calling for the murder of Palestinian Arabs. “I’m Jewish, I’m very pro-Israel,” he said. “And so I yelled out ‘Israel forever. Hamas are murderers.’”
A petition calling on the university to fire Strauss has garnered over 6,700 signatures. A competing petition demanding the university allow Strauss to teach on campus has garnered over 9,200 signatures.
Well, so far, so outrageous. The administration has placed Strauss on administrative leave, requiring him to teach his courses remotely for the rest of the semester (fortunately, the semester has only a few more weeks to run). This decision was taken without allowing him to present his version of events. And the pro-Hamas students have done still worse: they have deliberately misrepresented what he said, so that it appears that he was denouncing, and wishing death upon, all Palestinians and not Hamas alone. But he was quite clear in his condemnation: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one [of them] should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
As one more example of the madness of anti-Israel crowds, some have called for this tenured professor to be fired, all because he expressed his hatred for torturers, rapists, sadistic mass murderers. We live in a world where the pathological condition known as antisemitism is twisting everything. Mass murderers are praised, while those who try to defend their people against those mass murderers are denounced. A fine world, my masters!
John Strauss is a tenured professor of economics at the University of Southern California. Crossing the campus in late November, he came across a pro-Hamas demonstration. Being pro-Israel, he proclaimed aloud his hatred for Hamas, the group whose operatives on October 7 beheaded babies, burned children alive, tortured and raped young girls, gouged out eyes, sliced off breasts, and cut off the genitalia of Israelis, both before and after death, murdered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Robert Spencer wrote about this briefly here, and more on what happened to Professor Strauss after he made his remarks, can be found here: “Jewish USC professor barred from campus after criticizing Hamas,” Israel National News, November 22, 2023:
The University of Southern California has banned a Jewish professor with tenure from teaching on campus for the rest of the semester for criticizing the Hamas terrorist organization.
Economics Professor John Strauss confronted anti-Israel demonstrators during a “Shut it Down for Palestine” protest on the USC campus on November 9.
The demonstrators accused Strauss of stepping on a list of people killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and yelled “shame on you, Professor Strauss, shame on you.”
The professor responded: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
The pro-Hamas students, determined to get Professor Strauss in trouble, posted a misleading clip that left out Strauss’ denunciation of Hamas, making it appear that he was calling for the death of all the Palestinians. So he was made to say “Everyone [of you] should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
About a dozen students complained to the university administration and claimed that Strauss threatened them. The next day, the associate dean called Strauss and told him he was being placed on administrative leave would only be allowed to teach his courses remotely for the rest of the semester.
Do you think a lone professor would have “threatened” dozens of angry pro-Palestinian students physically? How likely is that? What was the nature of that supposed threat made by Professor Strauss? And after a dozen of those students made their claim to the administration, why was it that the very next day, without even talking to Professor Strauss to hear his version of events — whatever happened to due process? — he was placed on administrative leave for the rest of the semester? Shouldn’t there have been an investigation into what Strauss said, rather than immediate acceptance of what those students claimed?
Strauss said in an interview with USC Annenberg Media that his comments were misrepresented to portray him as calling for the murder of Palestinian Arabs. “I’m Jewish, I’m very pro-Israel,” he said. “And so I yelled out ‘Israel forever. Hamas are murderers.’”
A petition calling on the university to fire Strauss has garnered over 6,700 signatures. A competing petition demanding the university allow Strauss to teach on campus has garnered over 9,200 signatures.
Well, so far, so outrageous. The administration has placed Strauss on administrative leave, requiring him to teach his courses remotely for the rest of the semester (fortunately, the semester has only a few more weeks to run). This decision was taken without allowing him to present his version of events. And the pro-Hamas students have done still worse: they have deliberately misrepresented what he said, so that it appears that he was denouncing, and wishing death upon, all Palestinians and not Hamas alone. But he was quite clear in his condemnation: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one [of them] should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
As one more example of the madness of anti-Israel crowds, some have called for this tenured professor to be fired, all because he expressed his hatred for torturers, rapists, sadistic mass murderers. We live in a world where the pathological condition known as antisemitism is twisting everything. Mass murderers are praised, while those who try to defend their people against those mass murderers are denounced. A fine world, my masters!
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