Intellectual savages?

Benighted humanists in Israel and in the West believe that Hamas’s terrorists are brainwashed, poor or illiterate, when in fact the best minds of Palestinian society are at the top of Islamic terrorism.

Is it inconceivable that people who have the holy mission of returning to Jaffa and Ashkelon on a carpet of Jewish bodies are also well-educated surgeons, academics and writers? Ask Hamas about the paradox of Josef Mengele, a doctor of philosophy, a medical doctor, a refined man who enjoyed music and poetry, but didn’t hesitate to experiment on an order the death of a million of Jews.

The Palestinian hatred has not been deciphered by our writers and intellectuals. It’s because we have been told that “they hate us” is the language of xenophobes, the illiberal, the intolerant; that genocidal anti-Semitism was buried in the ashes of Auschwitz; that we have to be polite and self-critical.

A seductive combination of post-colonial white guilt mixed with liberal condescension has dulled our moral senses and made us blind to an Islamism that conveys unleashed hatred, contempt, physical aggression, the desire to expel, to destroy and to eliminate the Jews.

Nizar Rayan was not only a Hamas terrorist leader. He was a fine historian, academic and intellectual. Author of more than 10 books on Islam, Rayan was killed in Jabalya along with his wife and three children. They remained in the house even after the Israelis had warned them of the raid. Rayan had sent a son on a suicide mission against a Jewish town in northern Gaza and had taken part in an attack on the Israeli port of Ashdod, which killed 10 “sons of pigs and monkeys,” as Rayan call the Jews.

Rayan was a gem of the Islamic University of Gaza, he had studied at the prestigious faculty of Um Dorman and had written an essay on the life of the Prophet, titled “Medina becomes Dark,” a best-seller in Saudi Arabia. His library, destroyed in the Israeli raid, contained 10,000 books.

Palestinian terrorism is led by academics, surgeons, scientists, scholars, intellectuals, people with an enviable curriculum vitae. Their biographies are the Palestinian version of al-Qaida. They are like Ayman al-Zawahiri, al- Qaida mastermind and a surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the mastermind in the execution of Daniel Pearl, who had studied at the London School of Economics; and the planner of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who attended US universities.

The head of the July 7 suicide bombers, Muhammad Siddique Khan, taught in Leeds, while the English doctor Bilal Abdullah, who participated in the failed attacks in London and Glasgow in June 2007, was born into one of the richest families in Baghdad.

THE HAMAS leadership is the most educated in the Arab world, with 500 high-level degrees between them.

Its leader, Khaled Mashaal, is a professor of physics and was an academic in Kuwait. Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, was dean of a university and his strongman for religious affairs, Muhammad Tartouri, is a dean of the College of Shari’a in Hevron, epicenter of jihad against the Jews.

Even among the Palestinian Arab “secular” terrorists you find many PhDs. Ahmed Sadat, who ordered the killing of Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi, is a professor, while terror mastermind George Habash was a doctor.

That is because there is no difference between the Hamas Covenant and the Covenant of the PLO. They both want Israel’s territorial truncation and eventual annihilation.

Fathi Shaqaqi, the late founder of Islamic Jihad, was a physician. The last of the Hamas’s founders still alive, Mahmoud Zahar, is an excellent doctor, a well-known specialist in the thyroid who founded the Palestinian Medical Society, his wife is a teacher, one of their children had a degree in finance and a daughter is a professor of English.

These two doctors are responsible for scores of children, women and elderly being incinerated on Egged buses in Israel; cafes and pizzerias destroyed; malls turned into slaughterhouses; mothers and daughters killed in front of ice cream shops; families exterminated in their own beds; infants executed with a blow to the base of the skull; fruit markets blown to pieces; nightclubs eviscerated along with hundreds of students; rabbinic seminarians murdered during their studies; husbands and wives killed in front of their children; children murdered in their mothers’ arms.

A well-known pediatrician was the Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Rantisi, a senior manager of the Arab Medical Society known for his tireless campaign to “kill as many Jews as possible.” Doctor Rantisi ordered that pieces of metal should be added to the explosives in the terrorist’s vest or backpack, with blasts often severing limbs completely. Israeli children have had their faces burned or their hands rendered useless; some have had their sight ruined forever.

A talented mathematician is Siyaam Saeed, Minister of the Interior. A former education minister, Nasser Eddin to Sha’er, studied in Manchester and New York. Ibrahim Hamed, the planner of brutal attacks such as the Moment Café, Ben-Yehuda Street and Hebrew University murders has a BA magna cum laude.

Baseem Naeem became a surgeon in Germany, Atif Adwan owes its formation to the most brilliant scientific universities in the United Kingdom, while Aziz Dweik learned perfect English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mousa Marzook, accused by Israel of involvement in the murder of Israeli civilians between 1990 and 1994, studied at Louisiana Tech and Columbia University.

Of the Palestinian suicide bombers, 47 percent had a college degree, 29% a high school diploma, 24% attended primary school. People like Dia Tawil, who came from a “bourgeois” family with no financial problems, “only” dreamed of killing Israelis. Tawil’s last words were: “Their bones will know the taste of death.”

Israel is confronting Islamic revolutionaries ready to drench the holy land with blood and Palestinian Arab pediatricians who send their angels of death to kill Israeli children. But we also live in a time when death – of Jews – is celebrated and romanticized in the “civilized” democracies.

These ferocious Palestinian anti-Semites have been sanitized by the Western public opinion which calls them “militants,” as The New York Times did last week.

I fear for Israel.

The writer is is an Italian journalist and author. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Commentary.