RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s safe to say Britain did not cover itself in glory this week. We’ve had legal bigwigs warning that we risk resurrecting the crime of blasphemy following the charging of a man for burning the Koran. We saw the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, announce that the UK government can’t be arsed with inquiries into the industrial-scale abuse of working-class girls by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men. And now, the icing on this rancid cake: British lawyers are agitating for Hamas to no longer be designated as a terrorist organisation.

Yes, a UK legal firm is making a plea for Hamas to be ‘un-proscribed’. It’s called Riverway Law. It’s making representations for Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’s head of international affairs. Their case is that Britain’s use of the term ‘terrorist’ against Hamas is a breach of its supporters’ human rights. I’m not making this up. It ‘unlawfully restricts’ their freedom of speech, apparently. Welcome to modern Britain, where you must never desecrate the Koran or expect an inquiry into rape gangs, but you might soon be free to say: ‘I love Hamas.’

The lawyers have submitted a 106-page legal application to the home secretary. It wails about how unfair it is that Britain brands Hamas a terror group. Yes, how dare we use the word terrorist to describe a movement that sent thousands of armed hysterics to slit the throats of Jews on 7 October 2023? Hamas is a ‘resistance movement’, the application says, whose aim is to ‘liberate Palestine’. The trouble is, Hamas, that those of us still in possession of a moral compass know what this means: you want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East of its Jews. You want to banish, with savage violence, the Jews from their homeland. And that’s terrorism. Actually, it’s worse: it’s the dream of genocide wrapped in the lie of ‘resistance’.

Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was proscribed in 2001. Its political wing was proscribed in 2021, when the then Tory government decided that the distinction between the two was ‘artificial’. The proscription means it’s a criminal offence for anyone here to be a member of Hamas or to drum up support for it. Waving the Hamas flag and wearing pro-Hamas clothing is a crime, too. Hamas – brace yourselves for this – is now citing the European Convention on Human Rights against the UK government. Your proscription of our lovely resistance movement is an assault on our British supporters’ ‘freedom of speech’, it says.

Look, I am such a free-speech fundamentalist that I even think people should be free to say they like Hamas. Join it? Absolutely not. Fundraise for it? No way. But spout bollocks about it being a ‘resistance movement’? Yes. Such speech is surely better dealt with in the free and rowdy public sphere than in the courts. My preference would be for Cable Street-style fightbacks against Britain’s witless armies of bourgeois and Islamist sympathisers with Hamas’s neo-fascism. Instead of us phoning the police, they should be phoning ambulances – as Mosley found out, that’s the risk you take when you hit our streets and sing the praises of Jew-killers.

Yet this case – of course – is not a plea for free speech. It’s a demand that we buy into Hamas’s vile lie about being a ‘liberation and resistance movement’ that just wants to ‘confront the Zionist project’. It’s a call not for liberty but for submission – the submission of the British government, and by extension British citizens, to Hamas’s frothing hatred for the Jewish nation that it perfidiously disguises as a political challenge to Zionism. This case is of a piece with the punishingly illiberal ideology of ‘Islamophobia’, in that it seeks to ringfence Islamist extremism from our moral judgement. In this case, our moral judgement that Hamas is a terrorist group and that its war on Israel is anti-Semitic barbarism.

Here’s the thing, though: it isn’t only Hamas and its weird lawyers who think the t-word should not be applied to this murderous movement. Polite society is packed with people who refuse to call these terrorists terrorists. Remember when the BBC published that smug, pious explanation for why it doesn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’? It’s because it’s a ‘loaded word’, it said, and it isn’t our job ‘to tell people who to support and who to condemn’. Who do they think they’re kidding? The Brexit-bashing, Trump-hating BBC has suddenly discovered impartiality? It published that piece just four days after Hamas raped and butchered the Jews of southern Israel. Reith spins in his grave.

On our campuses and streets, too, it is widely argued that Hamas aren’t terrorists. Many in the lost left, the left that’s in a suicide pact with Islamism, agree with Hamas that it’s a ‘liberation movement’. Queers for Palestine would probably still holler ‘They’re not terrorists!’ even as they fell to their deaths from a tall building in Gaza. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said students at George Washington University in the US after those ‘martyrs’ murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis. Hamas’s violence is ‘resistance’ and its mass murder of Jews was a ‘day of celebration’, say the Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the privileged West.

This is the most galling thing about Hamas’s legal request to be un-proscribed: swathes of the well-educated will be nodding in vociferous agreement. That unholy alliance of the West’s upper-class Israelophobes and its radicalised young Islamists will concur entirely with Hamas’s self-flattering calumny that its slaughter of Jews is ‘resistance’. Hamas’s plea to be re-designated as a political organisation speaks to its slipperiness and wickedness. The fact that its plea will find such favour among the privileged youths who will one day run Britain and America speaks to something worse: our own societies’ ferocious turn against the virtues of civilisation, which means even the barbarism of Hamas now captures some in its spell.

Of course the UK government should wholly reject Hamas’s lunatic plea. There must also be a very serious discussion about the European Convention on Human Rights. That that document can be wielded by Hamas as part of its sick campaign to make Jew-murder look respectable suggests it really is past its sell-by date. ‘Human rights’ law is now exploited by rapists who don’t want to be deported from Britain and by a terrorist organisation that wants to fool the world into thinking its barbarism is liberation. Rip it up.

But the rest of us have a tougher task: to restore reason to society. To confront the sympathy for barbarism that surrounds us. To say out loud that Hamas are terrorists, scum, Jew exterminators. To say Western civilisation is superior to Islamism, and to ignore the inevitable wails of ‘Islamophobe!’ that will follow.

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 – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy