“If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.” — Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub, Egyptian cleric.
Muslim extremists trust that time is in their side, in part because they are on the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons. Once Iran and other Muslim countries have this capability, they will have the military means to blackmail their oil-rich neighbors, destroy Israel and threaten Europe.
What makes negotiations with Iran, ISIS, Hamas or any other Islamist group impossible is that their leaders believe they are acting according to the immutable word of God. America, Israel, other Muslims with whom they disagree, cannot do anything to satisfy them except “submit” (the Arabic word “Islam” means “submission”). As Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub said in a televised sermon in 2009, “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. The Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”
Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other terror groups do not conceal their intentions. The Hamas covenant explicitly calls for Israel’s destruction and does not distinguish between Israelis and Jews:
Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious… It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine… It is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders…