Journalists who believe Hamas is fighting for Palestinian independence need to read the Hamas charter and study the rise of 20th century Islamism and its close association with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Hamas is a child of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its intellectual godfather, Sayyid Qutb, like Adolf Hitler, was heavily influenced by the Tsarist anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which sees Judaism as a plot for world domination via the banking system, media ownership and international capitalism.
The anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in the original Hamas charter of 1988 come from the Brotherhood and actually predate even the establishment of the State of Israel by two decades. Islamists influenced by the Brotherhood already hated Jews before the Nazis took power in Germany.
Such Islamist groups would arguably be just as anti-Semitic even if the UN had not proposed the establishment of the Jewish State in Resolution 181 in 1947.
Hamas, like its financial sponsor Iran, is also a hotbed of Holocaust denial. Hamas went through a protracted dispute with the UN in 2009 when the UN tried to implement school curriculum changes that would teach young Palestinians about the Holocaust. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency runs more than 200 of Gaza’s 600 primary and secondary schools.
Today’s Iranian leadership, while less forthright than its predecessors on Holocaust denial, continues to sponsor Holocaust denier conferences. This is unsurprising given the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, who led the 1979 Iranian Revolution against the Shah of Persia, was a vehement Holocaust denier.
President from 2005-13, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was even more fanatical on the subject. It is important for journalists reporting on Gaza to understand many of the region’s Muslim Imams and political leaders continue to believe The Protocols is a serious work of history, despite having been debunked for 100 years. This is the document that informs their view of Jews.
Hamas and Iran are more interested in killing Jews than they are in helping Palestinians. How else to explain Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk last week telling an Arabic interviewer who asked why Hamas would not shelter civilians in its network of tunnels that it was not up to Hamas to build bomb shelters or share tunnels built for war. This was work for UN refugee agencies and nothing to do with Hamas, which was nevertheless elected to govern Gaza in 2006.
Yet ABC reporters continue their decades-long tradition of ignoring questions Hamas should be asked, even though in the Arab world such questions are being raised.
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told LBCI International Television in Lebanon last week that Hamas “will repeat the October 7 attack (on civilian Israelis) time and again until Israel is annihilated. We are victims. Everything we do is justified.”
Credit to Sharri Markson on Sky News last Wednesday for playing a clip from Egyptian journalist Ibrahim Eissa raising the question the ABC seems incapable of discussing when reporting strikes by Israel in Gaza.
Eissa, editor in chief of the Cairo daily, Al Tahrir, and founder of the weekly Al-Dustour, asked: “Hamas has controlled and governed Gaza since 2007. In those 16 years, Hamas has built two Gaza strips. The Gaza which we know and the Gaza under – made of tunnels. Didn’t you think to make one shelter? One shelter? One? Thousands of kilometres of tunnels. And this organisation has spared the Palestinian people from even one. Sixteen years you engaged the Palestinian people in seven to eight wars and you didn’t even make one tunnel for them. You could have saved families. You could have saved infants. From certain death. So who is committing the crimes against the Palestinian people?”
ABC RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas bristled last Wednesday morning when Israel Defence Forces international spokesman Colonel Jonathan Conricus said Israel was not targeting civilians in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza but the Hamas terrorist leaders hiding in the tunnels beneath it.
Like many Western journalists, Karvelas seemed to struggle with what Conricus told her: Israel knew where the terrorists were hiding and that’s why it had for several weeks been urging civilians to move south for their own safety. It was Hamas that was making it difficult for civilians to leave.
Journalists educated at modern universities dominated by theories of post-colonialism and the power dynamics of language struggle with the idea radical Islamism is more than a fight for the displaced people of the Middle East. Islamism and its celebration of Jihad and martyrdom are foreign to modern Western thought.
This column on October 14 discussed the link between Hamas and Nazism going back to the 1941 meeting between the then Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin Al-Husseini, and Adolf Hitler. It did not explore the wider anti-Semitism rampant across the Middle East.
Hamas’s original 1988 charter, especially Chapter 7, sees Israeli Jews as having rejected the influence of Islam in the former British protectorate of Palestine. Hamas knows full well the Jews were there thousands of years before Islam began, but it sees its role as purging any group denying its Muslim heritage. It calls Israel a Waqf and the charter is strident about returning every Waqf to the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.
Hamas is at once Palestinian, Arabic and Islamist. In its world view, any Palestinian state would need to embrace Islamism. The horror of Hamas’s barbaric attack on Jewish women, children and old people in southern Israel on October 7 is not an aberration. It’s what the group actually stands for in its formal charter.
Quillette last week published an English translation of an interview in German with the Swiss Daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung. It discussed the massacre in Israel with New York author Paul Berman who wrote The New York Times bestseller Terror and Liberalism after the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks by al-Qa’ida.
Berman says: “I consider it a mistake to interpret Hamas solely as a local nationalist movement. The establishment of a conventional Palestinian state would not satisfy their demands … The ultimate goal of Islamism is to establish a certain type of Islam throughout the Muslim world.
“Here is a movement, Hamas, that is openly committed to a racist and genocidal ideology. But many people do not want to let go of their idea that the world is a place where there are simple causes and effects, and the causes are always material, and doctrines do not count for anything. People are blind to the ideology at work here. You can see it in the media, which are often naive.”
This is where Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was correct in his speech last week: “Today we draw a line between civilisation and barbarism.”
The Holocaust is the most evil act in human history because, rather than a war crime, it was a government implementing an industrial scale murder machine designed to eliminate Jews. It is not comparable with Israel rooting out terrorists from Gaza after warning civilians to leave.
Good on Karvelas on Friday morning for challenging UN human rights rapporteur Francesca Albanese over UN claims of genocide by Israel against Palestinians. Genocide has a formal legal meaning and Palestinians are the fastest growing demographic in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.
This is not to deny every Palestinian death is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy brought on deliberately by Hamas’s barbarism.
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