Can the world offer a sympathetic hearing to a group that claims divine rights
to annihilate an entire nation? Apparently so.
Hamas is increasingly
indulged by self-acclaimed forward-thinkers who might not relish being reminded
that the Hamas Charter’s first section opens with the blunt assertion that
“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had
eliminated its predecessors.”
And lest anyone pooh-pooh this, Hamas
anchors its Jew-revulsion in the Koran: “Ignominy shall be their [the Jews’]
portion wheresoever they are found.... They have incurred anger from
their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them.... They disbelieved the
revelations of Allah, and slew the Prophets wrongfully... They were
rebellious and transgressed.” (Surat Al-Imran III, verses 109-111)
This is no
trifling lip-service which Western postmodernists so blithely belittle.
Dissidence is deemed as heresy in Muslim dominions and heresy exacts pitiless
retribution, as the Hamas Charter indeed warns: “Whoever denigrates the Hamas
movement’s worth, or avoids supporting it, or is so blind as to dismiss its
role, is challenging Fate itself. Whoever closes his eyes from seeing the
facts, whether intentionally or not, will wake up to find himself overtaken by
events, and will find no excuses to justify his position.”
Hamas isn’t
about amicable accommodation. It “strives to raise the banner of Allah over
every inch of Palestine.”
Moreover, calling itself a “humane movement,”
Hamas stipulates that “safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of
Islam... Members of other religions must desist from struggling against Islam...
for if they were to gain the upper hand, fighting, torture and uprooting would
follow.”
Clearly it’s Hamas’s way or the highway. But few Obama
administration stalwarts or EU pontificators will let Hamas’s own covenant
prevent them from making nice to Allah’s fearsome warriors. It’s the hottest
trend sweeping through the West’s chic “non-judgmental” classes.
It’s a
pattern which replicates itself. The international community can’t wait to
whitewash, exonerate, find extenuating excuses for and otherwise legitimize Arab
terrorists, lessen their culpability, conceal their ideology, make light of
their record, explain away their sins and in general gloss over their proven
malice.
It began with Fatah and had now, incredibly, moved on to Hamas.
The process is similar. The terrorists’ prime victim (Israel) is
demonized to provide pretexts for targeting it and to create a pervasive premise
whereby the victim deserves any and all misfortunes. Concomitantly, the
terrorists begin to carry out some of their more repugnant operations under
other names and covers.
This enables them to feign innocence, when it so
suits them, and appear to all and sundry as nothing less than the actual
moderating forces in the arena, as quasi-good guys, as suitable interlocutors
and as overall deserving of understanding.
Some of the worst Fatah
atrocities were perpetrated over the years under mutating monikers that took the
heat off the chief conspirators. These embedded in the popular mind surrogate
nasties like Tanzim or al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, to say nothing of associate PLO
gangs that shared some of the dirty load and helped obfuscate the
guilt.
Hamas has gained prodigious expertise in pulling off the same sort
of brazen deception. It occasionally slaughters under different guises and on
other occasions it merely allows associates to carry out hits.
These
associates – like Islamic Jihad – are fully tolerated and allowed a free hand.
When Hamas doesn’t stomach any particular faction, there’s no mistaking its
terrifying animus. Gaza’s ultra-extreme Salafists had tasted it on more
than one occasion in ferocious raids and executions which didn’t spare wives,
children or elderly parents. Salafist mosques weren’t accorded the status
of sacrosanct sanctuaries, either.
Therefore, when Islamic Jihad barrages
southern Israel for days on end with assorted missiles, mortars and whatnot,
there’s no escaping the conclusion that it had obtained Hamas’s green light to
do so.
The sham allows Hamas to parade as at least
semi-reasonable. It allows assorted self-professed good souls the world
over (along with their eager leftist echoes inside Israel) to agitate openly for
a rethink on Hamas, for conferring respectability upon it, for treating it as a
bona fide negotiating partner, for trying to cut deals with it, for seeking
coexistence with Gaza’s warlords.
Poignant hand wringing about Gaza’s
fictitious humanitarian plight was from the outset geared to generate compassion
for Hamastan. Hence Israel’s defensive blockade to foil gunrunning to the Strip
was censured as a brutal siege against helpless civilians trapped in a virtual
concentration camp.
This falsehood is recycled as an axiomatic truth and
human rights advocates have become the staunchest defenders of fanatics who
disdain the very sentimental broadmindedness they exploit to bamboozle polite
Western society.
THE ADDRESS by a Hamas emissary at a function
facilitated by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last month was but a recent
example of creeping acceptance of Hamas internationally. The UNHRC, of
course, embodies the cynical skewing of august values and the deliberate
deformation of rights-based discourse. But penchants for sugarcoating
Hamas extend beyond this discredited forum.
Chocolate-box Switzerland,
where the UNHRC is ensconced, is a cogent case in point. Last January a Hamas
delegation visited Geneva to attend a session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union,
which purportedly fosters dialogue between parliaments in a bid to promote
“peace and cooperation among peoples” and “the firm establishment of
representative democracy.”
Invoking its hallowed neutrality, Switzerland
doesn’t list Hamas as a terrorist organization and accordingly admitted its
hotshots without any reservation.
Also on Hamas’s Swiss itinerary was a
university conference organized by the Droit Pour Tous (Right for all) NGO to
mark Operation Cast Lead’s third anniversary. Mushir al- Masri, who represented
Hamas, insisted that “Hamas never attacks civilians.”
Thereafter, Masri
and his cohort Khamis al-Najjar chummily hobnobbed with Swiss politicians in the
capital, Bern.
Masri described his talks as geared to stress “the need
for openness and positive engagement with Hamas by Switzerland and European
countries, because Hamas is open to Europe.”
His junket to Switzerland
coincided with reports of contacts between Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal and Swiss
Mideast envoy Jean-Daniel Ruch in the framework of efforts to “normalize
relations with European governments.”
“Switzerland has regular contacts
with Hamas which stem from its traditional policy of dialogue, in particular
over conflict resolution, respect for human rights and international
humanitarian law,” asserted Swiss Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Carole
Wälti.
Such sanctimony raises two possibilities. Perhaps Switzerland
(along with plenty of other European states, exhibiting varying degrees of
disingenuousness) knows what Hamas is but just doesn’t really give a hoot. A
kinder alternative is that the Swiss don’t quite know what Hamas preaches (or
don’t wish to burden their selective conscience with excess information -as per
precedents from Third Reich days about other genocidal harangues).
That
said, it’s easy to gain enlightenment. Anyone who peruses Hamas’s own charter
won’t encounter a conspicuous predisposition for compromise. Palestine,
declares Hamas, “has been an Islamic Wakf throughout the generations and until
the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or
part of it. No Arab country nor the aggregate of all Arab countries, and
no Arab king or president nor all of them in the aggregate, have that
right.”
There’s more: “So-called peaceful solutions, and international
conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs
of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means
renouncing part of the religion.”
The Charter’s unequivocal position is
that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by
Jihad.”
Anyone familiar with Mein Kampf will discover kindred
insinuations about the insidious forces of “International Judaism.” Jews, avers
the Hamas Charter, citing the infamous fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion as
proof, are the instigators of all strife on this planet: “There was no war that
broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.”
Get a load of Hamas
historiography: Jews “stood behind the French and Communist revolutions and
behind most all revolutions.... They also used money to establish
clandestine organizations... to destroy societies and carry out Zionist
interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs,
B’nai B’rith, etc. All of them are destructive spying
organizations.”
Nobody, contends the Hamas Charter, disputes that Jews
“stood behind WWI, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate... and
established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that
organization. They also stood behind WWII.... They inspired the
establishment of the UN and the Security Council to replace the League of
Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.”
Lavishing
liberal love on Gaza won’t do the trick because Hamas is leery of do-gooders who
come with “publicity and movies, curricula of education and culture, using as
their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist
Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as the
Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of
saboteurs and sabotage.”
Of more immediate concern is the Charter’s
reminder to “every Muslim that when the Jews occupied Holy Jerusalem in 1967 and
stood at the doorstep of the blessed Aksa Mosque, they shouted with joy:
Muhammad is dead, he left daughters behind.”
Sounds nuts? You didn’t
cheer Muhammad’s demise in ’67? You don’t know anybody who did so at the Temple
Mount? You can’t imagine any Jew chanting such bizarre claptrap upon returning
to the Jewish Holiest of Holies? You suspect this must be a loony gag?
And
what’s all this about daughters?
What strike us as demented ravings constitute
calumny and incitement that tug hard at cultural chords deep inside
Hamastan. But precisely because we’re so utterly baffled by them, they
underscore the gaping psychological and intellectual chasms which most likely
cannot be bridged no matter how much we try to suck up to Gaza’s Muslim
Brotherhood offshoot.
The Hamas Charter’s own bottom-line for the above
inscrutable gibberish about Muhammad’s daughters leaves no room for doubt:
“Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies
Islam and the Muslims.” Need any more be said?
www.sarahhonig.com
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