RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forget ‘centrist dads’, there’s a new political character in town: the centrist fascist. The moderate Jew-killer. The middle-of-the-road cheerleader of mass murder. It’s Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who was bumped off in Tehran yesterday, presumably by the Israel Defence Forces. Reading the strangely pained media coverage of his death, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d been a pragmatic, upstanding guy, someone who was considered ‘very moderate’, in the words of Sky News crank, Alex Crawford. In truth, of course, he was a militant anti-Semite and we should spend as much time mourning his passing as he did the Jews his comrades butchered on 7 October: ie, none.

The m-word I expected to see in the commentary on Haniyeh was ‘murderous’ – the m-word I got was ‘moderate’. For all his ‘tough rhetoric’, he was actually ‘moderate and pragmatic’, says BBC correspondent, Yolande Knell. That ‘tough rhetoric’ included calling the 7 October pogrom a ‘victory’, agitating for a further ‘jihad of the swords’ (that is, more Jew murder), and chanting about the ‘army of Muhammad’ returning to wreak vengeance on Jews. BBC types will damn you as a crazy extremist if you say women don’t have cocks, and then straight-up depict a man who wanted to draw swords against Jews as a moderate.

He was ‘pragmatic’ and ‘open to negotiation’, says the Guardian. CNBC at least had the decency to caveat its insane commentary, only calling Haniyeh a ‘relatively moderate figure’. He was seen ‘as a moderate’, says Reuters, certainly in comparison with ‘more hardline’ Hamas leaders. Seriously, what does ‘moderate’ even mean in the Hamas context? This is a terror outfit whose founding charter committed it to the murder of Jews. And which slaughtered more Jews in one day on 7 October 2023 than anyone else had since the Nazis. A fascistic act Haniyeh celebrated. Perhaps he only wanted to kill some Jews, not all of them? Is that ‘pragmatism’ in Hamasworld?

The killing of Haniyeh has sent shockwaves around the world. He joined Hamas upon its creation in 1987. He swiftly moved up its ranks and by the late 1990s, following various stints in Israeli jails, he was running the office of Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He became Palestinian prime minister in 2006, after Hamas won the most seats in the Palestine-wide elections, but he was dismissed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2007. In 2017, he was elected leader of Hamas’s political wing, though he swiftly went into exile in Qatar where he lived it up as ordinary Gazans suffered in the various wars started by his cronies.

During the 2000s, as he soared to power in Hamas’s political wing, the movement’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was murdering hundreds of Israelis. They detonated suicide bombs in discotheques, pizza restaurants, on buses. And they did so from a belief that ‘the Jews are the most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl upon the face of the Earth’, in the words of Hamas’s one-time minister of culture, Atallah Abu Al-Subh. Imagine if someone had told you, while all that racist slaughter was taking place 20 years ago, that one day the political head of the movement behind it would be borderline gushed over as a ‘moderate’ in the mainstream media. You’d have thought them mad. Yet here we are.

What apparently made him a ‘moderate’ is that he was open to talks with Israel. He was cool with having backdoor channels with the Jewish State. Okay, but he was also cool with having underground tunnels from which the Jewish State’s demise was feverishly plotted by fanatics. He supported the fascist terror of 7 October. He cheered the spilling of Palestinian blood, too. ‘[The] blood of the women, children and elderly… we need this blood so that it will ignite with us the spirit of revolution’, he said. I can think of a word that begins with ‘m’ to describe a man who lived in luxury in Qatar while wallowing in the deaths of his own people in Gaza – it’s not moderate, it’s monster. Not only Israelis but Palestinians too are better off following the assassination of this creep.

The very circumstances of his death call into question the delusional view of him as ‘moderate’. He was in Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president. There are clips showing attendees chanting ‘Death to America, Death to Israel!’. I am going to go out on a limb and say that if you head up the political wing of a Jew-killing movement and bask in cries for the destruction of the Jewish State, you have forfeited your right to be called ‘moderate’. The West’s woke media really has lost the plot. They treat Trump voters as lunatics, brand JD Vance as ‘weird’ and damn the likes of Nigel Farage as deranged zealots, and yet they wonder out loud if Ismail Haniyeh was low-key agreeable.

There is a palpable fretting among the West’s political and media elites following the assassination of Haniyeh. Especially as it came just hours after Israel killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in Lebanon. Oh no, the West’s talking heads cry, what will happen next? Might there be escalation? ‘Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh is killed in Iran by an alleged Israel airstrike, threatening escalation’, says one headline, capturing the general commentariat dread in the aftermath of this killing. These are Orwellian levels of moral contortionism. It was Haniyeh and his movement that ‘escalated’ tensions in the Middle East when they green-lighted the rape, kidnap and murder of more than a thousand people in Israel on 7 October. Assassinating the racist killers of Jews is not escalation – it’s justice.

Western observers seem obsessed with ‘de-escalation’ in the Middle East. They want calm. But what is calm for them is potential catastrophe for the Jewish State. The ‘peace’ these people call for would be the peace of the grave for many Israelis. Hamas has promised to carry out more 7 Octobers. For Israel to leave such a movement intact would be risky in the extreme. The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh sends a clear message to the world, and it’s one that every true progressive ought to welcome: namely, that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Fascist violence has consequences now.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy