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Hamas’ anti-Western strategy

*Hamas was established in 1988, as a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, as were ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Jihad, Boko Haram and scores of additional terror entities. The Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Sunni terror organization, haunting all pro-US Arab regimes, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Africa, Europe and the USA. Its strategic goal is to topple all national Muslim regimes, bring the Western “infidel” to submission, and establish a universal Muslim society.  

*Hamas, just like the Muslim Brotherhood, considers Israel as “an infidel” entity in “the abode of Islam,” a US beachhead in the Middle East and a deterring ally of all pro-US Arab regimes.

*The 1988 Hamas charter highlights the Quran as its constitution, Jihad as its path, and martyrdom as its loftiest tactic.  It urges the “believers” to kill Jews, as specified in Article 7 of the charter, quoting one of the Prophet Muhammad’s Hadiths (verbal teachings): “When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say: O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him….”

*Hamas is assisted, militarily and financially, by Iran’s Ayatollahs (as well as by Qatar and Turkey), who – just like the Muslim Brotherhood – perceive the war against the “illegitimate” Jewish State as a preview of their war on “the apostate” pro-US Arab regimes and “the infidel” West, with a focus on “the Great American Satan.”

*Hamas and other Islamic and Palestinian terrorist organizations have collaborated with enemies and rivals of the US and the West, such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Bloc, Iran’s Ayatollahs, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and terror organizations in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/16/why-wont-the-jews-just-let-themselves-be-killed/

So let me get this right. If Israel bombs Hamas targets in Gaza, it is recklessly endangering civilian life. But if it gives civilians fair warning to move away from certain areas, it is engaging in ethnic cleansing. If it drops bombs in built-up suburbs, it is committing a war crime. But if it advises civilians to leave those built-up suburbs before the bombs come, it is also committing a war crime. If it attacks northern Gaza, that’s genocide. Yet when it tells the civilians of northern Gaza to leave first, that’s ‘forced transfer’, which is to say: genocide.

Everything Israel does is a war crime. Everything. Killing civilians – war crime. Trying not to kill civilians – war crime. Bombing populated areas – war crime. Giving a population time to leave before dropping bombs – war crime. The surrealism of these screams of ‘genocide!’ every time an Israeli soldier so much as picks up his gun was brought home by two headlines in the Independent last week, published just 10 hours apart. Israel is engaged in ‘collective punishment in Gaza’, claimed the first. ‘Israel accused of “trying to ethnically cleanse Gaza Strip” as one million ordered to evacuate’, said the second.

Got that, Israel? ‘Punish’ Palestinians and you’re a criminal. Do everything in your power to avoid ‘punishing’ Palestinians and you’re still a criminal. I’m starting to wish the Israel-haters would just say what they mean with their entire chest: ‘Let yourselves be killed, Jews. Don’t fight back. Don’t do anything at all.’

The twists in the public discussion of Israel’s military response to Hamas’s recent act of unspeakable barbarism have been extraordinary. It was predictable, given the Israelophobic myopia of the West’s cultural elites, that Israel would be damned the minute it took action against the neo-fascists who had just executed the worst act of anti-Semitic savagery since the Holocaust. All the usual accusations were made. Israel’s missile strikes add up to ‘collective punishment’. Israel is using ‘genocidal language’. It is committing ‘war crimes’. It is ‘breaking international law’. Etc etc. One is forced to wonder what kind of messed-up law prevents the victims of racist slaughter from pursuing their killers.

This time, what’s been most striking is that even Israel’s efforts not to hit civilians, not to ‘collectively punish’ Gazans, have been rebranded as war crimes. Consider its advice that the people of northern Gaza should evacuate their homes so that they won’t be injured or killed in bombings. This is being called ‘ethnic cleansing’. One Palestinian politician says it is further proof that Israel is waging a war of ‘annihilation’. This is linguistic contortionism of an Orwellian degree: in trying to avoid annihilating the people of northern Gaza, Israel is being annihilationist. War is peace, freedom is slavery, evacuation is annihilation. Ash Sarkar says the evacuation is a ‘Second Nakba’. Norway’s Refugee Council damns it as ‘forced transfer’, which – you guessed it – is a war crime. It must be. Israel’s doing it.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-gaza-civilians-united-nations-1222797b?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As Israel prepares for its likely ground invasion to pursue Hamas in Gaza, the world is warning about civilian casualties. The moral point to keep in mind as the fighting gets intense is that the responsibility for those casualties will lie with Hamas.

Israel has an obligation to do what it can to protect civilians, and it is doing so. It has warned Gazans to move to the south of the territory as it prepares its campaign. It is using precision-guided bombs when it can to target Hamas combatants rather than civilians. No one has a bigger strategic stake in reducing civilian Palestinian casualties than Israel given the propaganda fodder they provide its enemies.

Contrast that with Hamas, which gave no warning to the Israeli and foreign civilians it slaughtered on Oct. 7. Killing civilians was the explicit goal. Hamas has ordered Gazans not to flee, and its leaders hide weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel built bomb shelters for its citizens. Hamas built a network of tunnels for its combatants but keeps its civilians above ground, where they can be used as human shields or casualties showcased on TV. It’s not too much to say that Hamas wants Palestinian casualties to stir an uprising on the West Bank and turn world opinion against the Jewish state.

Yet the United Nations and others criticize Israel more than they do Hamas. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has denounced Israel’s evacuation order but he says little about Hamas’s human blockade.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-siege-of-hamas-is-no-war-crime-da6f5659?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Most victims of the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel weren’t yet buried when some prominent international voices—including U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the nonprofit Human Rights Watch, and Josep Borell, the European Union’s top diplomat—suggested that Israel’s first efforts to defend itself are war crimes. This raises an important question: Does international law require a nation to choose between committing war crimes and having war crimes committed against it?

The answer is no. One of the great tragedies of war is that civilians often become victims. That is why countries like Israel resort to war only as self-defense, which, according to the United Nations Charter, is every nation’s inherent right. But if even unintentional harm to civilians constitutes illegal “collective punishment,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Israel’s operations in Gaza, even defensive war is effectively precluded.

The law of war prohibits directly targeting civilians. Israel has made clear that its objectives are only military. “The IDF will destroy Hamas,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday, “and we will hunt down every last man with the blood of our children on his hands.”

But military targets can be attacked even when doing so may result in the loss of civilian life. International humanitarian law requires that civilian casualties from a particular action be balanced against “anticipated military advantage,” a rule known as proportionality. In practice, as this rule is understood by Western countries, even significant civilian casualties don’t necessarily make strikes on legitimate targets illegal.

Hamas has violated international law by hiding among civilians. But international law doesn’t reward the use of human shields. Instead, it makes clear that “the presence of civilians within or near military objectives does not render such objectives immune from attack.” Israel’s critics want it to fight in a way that would have made it impossible for democracies to wage war in every conflict from World War II to the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS, which killed about 10,000 civilians by some estimates.

A legal analysis of Israel’s response must take into account the barbarity and scale of Hamas’s attack. Israel now knows that Hamas’s goal is the annihilation of the Jewish people and the Jewish state. Defeating Hamas isn’t simply a tactical military goal but an existential national one—a military objective of the highest order. There is no basis on which to bar Israel ex ante from a generally lawful means of warfare such as siege, or maneuver in urban areas.

https://www.jns.org/hamas-weaponizes-sympathy-for-civilians-they-help-kill/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5m

Suffering in Gaza is real, though the false victimhood narrative gives Hamas benefits and deflects attention from saving the hostages and defeating the terrorists.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but most of the talking heads and pundits are managing to pull it off. Unlike the hard left, most liberals and Democrats have not abandoned sanity and embraced the open antisemitism that has been expressed at rallies for “Palestine,” in which Hamas is not just supported but justified. To the contrary, at least for the moment, the old bipartisan consensus in favor of Israel seems to have re-emerged since the unspeakable terrorist atrocities on Oct. 7. The vast majority of Democrats and almost all Republicans are solidly backing Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas, even as many of them also speak of their concerns about Palestinian suffering.

But only a week after the slaughter of men, women and children in the Jewish communities along the Gaza border and at a music concert attended by young adults—and with Israel still sifting through the wreckage, finding bodies of the slain and tortured victims of these atrocities, and preparing to bury some 1,400 people—the conversation about the conflict is shifting. To no one’s surprise, the headlines are now all about a “humanitarian crisis” and not a hostage crisis, even though the fate of the estimated 150 people, including 14 Americans, kidnapped by Hamas is still unknown. The suffering of Palestinians—President Joe Biden has been at pains to try and differentiate from the terror group, stating that “the vast majority of them have nothing to do with Hamas”—has become the world’s top concern.

Callousness about deaths in Gaza is wrong. So, too, are overwrought expressions of rage about terrorist crimes that lead to talk about wiping out the Palestinians or turning a place where so many people live into a parking lot.

However, Biden is wildly overstating his case about the level of support Hamas can count on. More important than that, the seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of Western politicians to deny that Hamas represents Palestinian aspirations is linked to a wave of sympathy for the Palestinians that is bound to influence administration policy as the war continues.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/savages/

We’re in a war between savages and civilization. Everything else is a detail.

Some of us woke up to that war when planes crashed into skyscrapers. Others when we saw beheading videos spread across social media. What we saw in Israel, Hamas terrorists raping, mutilating and defiling corpses, is another bloody wake-up call. There will be many others.

Beyond the politics and the geopolitics, we still haven’t come to terms with what we’re fighting.

The barbarism of murdering women and children, taking them as hostages, and posting photos of their dead bodies to social media, is not a byproduct of Islamic warfare, it’s the whole point.

Cruelty, beheading, burning to death, torturing and mutilating are the essence of Islam. This is how Islamic warfare was practiced beginning with Mohammed for over a thousand years. It’s how it continues to be practiced, whether it’s ISIS fighting other Muslims, Azerbaijani troops killing Armenians, Hamas attacking Israelis, or Islamic terrorists plotting carnage in Western nations.

Islam was born out of a war by barbarians against the civilized societies of Persia and Byzantium. Despite academic mythmaking, its vision never extended beyond rape and slavery, its empires fell into power struggles, beginning with Sunnis and Shiites, and its cultural and scientific accomplishments were all looted from conquered peoples. When civilization finally toppled the Ottoman Empire with some help from its internal barbarians, the cycle began again.

Israel is just one front in a global war between savages and civilization. And not all of the savages bow to Allah. There are inner city gangs across the American hemisphere that behead and torture their victims. And there are children of civilization that turn into savages. Savagery is not a condition of birth: it is a choice. People born into savagery can become civilized and those born into the highest echelons of civilization can prey on us like the worst vicious animals.

The question is how do civilized societies confront savagery? Do we blame ourselves for having made the savages what they are through our capitalism and colonialism even though they have behaved this way long before modern western civilization amounted to anything? Or do we set forth to reeducate them, to build modern nations for them and teach them to become civilized?

We have sent forth our sons and daughters to make peace with them and to educate them. Our societies opened themselves to embrace and celebrate the virtues of the noble savage. When we realized that we could not coexist with savages, we tried to remake our societies to serve them. All of that has been tried and civilization is still drowning in the violence of the savages.

The fundamental truth is that civilization and savagery are innately at war with one another.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20059/iran-helped-hamas-assault

“We coordinated with Hezbollah and with Iran and the Axis [of Resistance] before, during and after the battle at the highest level.” — Hamas representative Ahmed Abdulhadi, revealing Hamas coordination before and during the massacre, Newsweek, October 11, 2023.

Another Hamas official, Ali Baraka, told Russia’s state-run RT outlet that his group had secretly planned the assault for two years and did not inform any other factions or allies, including Iran and Hezbollah, of the “zero hour.” Baraka confirmed that Iran “gives us money and weapons.”

While many in the West chose to disregard Iran’s role in arming, training and funding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the same cannot be said about a large number of Arabs who have long been warning of Tehran’s expansionist actions in the Middle East. Some of those Arabs have been openly talking about how Iran uses its proxies to wreak havoc not only on Israel, but on some Arab countries. Through its proxies, the Iranian regime now effectively occupies Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in addition to the Gaza Strip. The Arabs, in short, see clearly what many Westerners apparently want to remain oblivious to.

“Hamas is an organization affiliated with the clerical regime in Iran, just like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and it is the same axis that threatens Saudi Arabia and Kuwait day and night. We differentiate between a just cause and a terrorist axis.” — Mansour al-Malik, Saudi Arabian petroleum engineer, on X, October 8, 2023.

“Iranian Regime Mouthpiece Kayhan : Iran Is The Mind And Hands Behind Hamas; Operation ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ [The Invasion of Israel] Was Planned By Qods Force Commander Qassem Soleimani Before he Was Killed; Khamenei Hinted in August 2022 at ‘The Complete Conquest of Israel.” — Report by the Middle East Media Research Institute, (MEMRI), October 12, 2023.

“Iranian Website Asr-e Calls On Iranians Not To Speak Out On Iranian Involvement In ‘The Hamas-Israel Conflict’ – For Fear Of Harming Iranian Interests….” — Report by MEMRI, October 13, 2023.

What will it take for the US and its allies to grasp that the appeasement of the Iranian regime is read by the mullahs and their proxies as weakness? If such appeasement continues, make no mistake: today, the carnage is Israel; tomorrow, it will be the US and Europe.

The Biden administration insists that it does not have any evidence of Iran’s “direct” involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The Biden administration has apparently totally dismissed the Wall Street Journal report on October 9, “Iran Helped Plot Attack on Israel Over Several Weeks,” as well as the Washington Post’s “Hamas received weapons and training from Iran, officials say.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-west-has-israeli-blood-on-its-hands/

The mass terror attacks on October 7th by Hamas against Israeli citizens is a milestone of heinous savagery––the beheading of some of 40 murdered babies, the slaughter of 1300 Israelis and 27 Americans, as well as the usual indiscriminate butchering, rape, torture, grisly videos flaunting the dead, and hostages taken to brutalize and hold for ransom. None of this is new, but the scale of the attack and the atrocities mark a dangerous escalation.

One contributing cause of this mayhem is the feckless, if not lunatic, foreign policy blunders of the Biden administration. But the last 75 years of Western foreign policy and its idealizing illusions, along with sacrifices of Israel’s security to Western national interests, have been predicates for this mass savagery.

There’s no question that actions both taken and avoided by Biden’s puppeteers enabled the terrorists and their patron and financier Iran. Our willful blindness about the Iranian Revolution and the mullahs’ religious motives reached its post-Cold War apogee in the Munich-class appeasement of Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons via the Iran nuclear deal signed by Barack Obama.

Donald Trump wisely ended our participation in this dangerous “parchment barrier.” He increased sanctions on Iranian oil sales, imposed “maximum pressure” on its economy, and took out one of Iran’s most effective and dangerous terrorist bosses, Qassem al Soleimani, despite our foreign policy clerks who issued dire warnings of apocalypse in the region.

Yet for Israel, disaster didn’t happen on Trump’s watch, but on Biden’s. Biden transferred billions of dollars to Iran, and relaxed sanctions on oil sales, allowing the regime to generate $80 billion more from oil exports. He squandered our country’s prestige on groveling outreach to lure Iran back to the nuclear deal, even though the regime has serially violated its terms from the start, in addition to attacking Americans 83 times––with a U.S. military response to only four.

As a result of Biden’s cringing solicitude, Iran now has enough enriched uranium to be months away from producing nuclear weapons, and has increased its support to violent proxies and clients like Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and other jihadist storm troopers. Indeed, according to The Gatestone Institute, “Iran provides roughly $100 million a year to Palestinian terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and $700 million a year to Hezbollah.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/enablers-of-hamas-should-take-gaza-refugees-c7c4b44c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Thousands of civilians in Gaza are about to endure another nightmare brought on by Hamas’s mass slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis and foreign nationals. Now that the border between Israel and Gaza is mostly under control, Israeli forces are preparing for a ground invasion to end Hamas’s brutal rule. The battle isn’t likely to end quickly.

Civilians are seeking to flee in advance of the fighting, and we shouldn’t expect Israel to take them in. With nowhere else to go, Egypt is the only possible escape route for Palestinians hoping to find refuge by land.

The U.S. has already started to discuss this with the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, according to recent reports. An Israeli military spokesman, when asked by reporters where displaced persons might go, suggested Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula is the logical location. He added, “Anyone who can get out, I would advise them to get out.” In an interview with Army Radio, Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Kisch also said that Palestinians seeking to flee Gaza should look to Egypt.

The Rafah crossing on the Egypt-Gaza border is open. The Israeli military issued a statement on Oct. 10 indicating that it was briefly closed. Egyptian officials later told Reuters that operations at Rafah had been disrupted by a nearby Israeli airstrike but had reopened shortly afterward, at least for humanitarian purposes. On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said that Hamas has been preventing people from leaving through the Rafah crossing.

Egypt may not be thrilled about the role it is being asked to play. Egyptian security sources have said it wouldn’t permit a mass exodus of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai. Cairo is deeply skeptical of Hamas, given the terrorist organization’s roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt’s government views as a threat. Moreover, Cairo has consistently tried to distance itself from any responsibility for Gaza, which it occupied between 1948 and 1967.