If Labor truly opposes anti-Semitism, why risk importing Hamas’s psychotic hatred of Jews?

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess. Picture: Martin Ollman/NewsWire

Speaking a few days ago on the ABC’s Insiders program, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said “rhetorical support” for Hamas should not bar applicants in Gaza from receiving visas for Australia.

What Burgess meant by “rhetorical support” was entirely unclear. Nor has Burgess clarified the boundaries of “rhetorical support” since then. But if “rhetorical support” involves endorsing Hamas’s actions or values, Burgess’s statement needs to be promptly and explicitly rejected by the government.

It is, to begin with, undeniable that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that has committed heinous crimes against both Israelis and Palestinians. That approving those crimes, which include mass rapes and murdering babies in cold blood, ought to be sufficient to preclude entry into Australia should hardly need saying.

But it is not just support for Hamas’s actions that deserves to be problematic. It is sharing any part of Hamas’s core beliefs and prejudices, even if that falls short of adopting every element of its ideology.

At the heart of those beliefs and prejudices is a genocidal, racially based, hatred of Jews. That hatred has, from Hamas’s earliest days, underpinned its paranoid view of the world.

Four elements, incessantly repeated in its propaganda, form that paranoid view’s intellectual scaffolding. The first is the claim that Jews, as a matter of biology, are inherently evil.

Thus, according to the late Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the immensely popular preacher whose teaching shapes the movement’s outlook, the Koran, in describing Jews as “descendants of apes and pigs, removed the veil over their soul and revealed the qualities they inherited from their ancestors”.

By the very nature of that genetic inheritance, Jews “are treacherous and insolent”. “Enemies of God and humanity”, these “wicked and arrogant monsters in the shape of human beings ... think that all peoples except them are inferior to animals and (that) all of humanity must serve them”.

As a result, said Qaradawi, using a phrase regularly echoed by Ismail Haniyeh (who regarded the sheik as his spiritual guide): “There is not a decent man among them, may the curse of Allah be upon them.”

Second, the Jews’ arrogance fuels their unquenchable desire for global dominance. “The Jews,” Qaradawi maintained, “want to impose their state of mind and their thought on the world, as attested in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” At the same time, the underlying purpose of “their satanic schemes is to transfer the entire wealth of humanity to Jewish financial institutions”.

To that end, they “accomplish their conspiracies silently throughout the world, like the silencer on a pistol”. Planning their actions in secret societies – which (according to Sheik Khaled Al-Maghribi of the Al-Aqsa Mosque) can only be joined by “bringing one’s sons or daughters, putting them on a table and slaughtering them as a sacrifice to Satan” – they penetrate “the world body politic while it is weak and paralysed”. And since they dissimulate their “satanic” conduct, even the seemingly most innocent Jew must be presumed guilty.

Third, it is this vast Jewish conspiracy that is responsible for the Muslim world’s persistent failures. “Muslims”, wrote Sayyid Qutb – the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood whose work inspired both Qaradawi and Hamas’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin – “have suffered from the Jews’ plots since Islam’s earliest days”.

It was the Jews who “caused Muhammad’s death”, “were responsible for the deaths of the second and third caliphs”, “started the rift between Shiites and Sunni” and even engineered the Young Turk revolution in 1905, paving the way for the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the end of the caliphate. Overall, the Jews’ “war on Muslims has not ceased for a single moment, from nearly 1400 years ago until now, when its fire is burning fervently throughout the entire world”.

Fourth and last, the jihad against Israel is merely the blood-soaked climax of that millennial battle between “the descendants of apes and pigs” and the Muslims, who, Qaradawi claims, “are the first nation in the world, the first nation in exact sciences and the arts, the masters of the world”.

In this Götterdämmerung, which will herald Islam’s triumph, the Jews “are marching towards their death, destruction and slaughter”. As a Hadith (a purported statement of Muhammad) commands, “The rocks and the trees will say: ‘O Muslim, O Servant of God: there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’” – and killing that Jew “is a personal obligation upon every Muslim”, even if it involves sacrificing one’s own life.

There are, for sure, “the lovers of pleasure in this world, who hate death”; but Muslims “prefer the death that grants its perpetrators the eternal Paradise of the next world”. Indeed, shortly before he died, Qaradawi told Hamas’s leading propaganda outlet that “I pray Allah will grant me, even at the end of my life, the opportunity to shoot Allah’s enemies – the Jews”.

Hamas’s belief system therefore epitomises what scholars call “redemptive anti-Semitism” – the anti-Semitism that views the extermination of the Jews as the key to the world’s salvation from demonic evil. In the words of the Hadith, “The Hour (of Judgment) will not arrive until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims slaughter them”.

The parallels to Nazism, with its horrifying visions of a racial apocalypse, are all too apparent. And it is also apparent why Qaradawi, like each and every one of Hamas’s ideologues, lavishly praised Hitler, saying that “during the course of history, Allah placed the Jews under the domination of other peoples to punish them for their sins. The most recent punishment of the Jews was Hitler; the next, with the help of Allah, will come from the Muslims”.

Mike Burgess

To provide even “rhetorical support” for Hamas’s core values is consequently no small thing: it is to believe tens of thousands of Australians have no right to live. And the fact that surveys find that more than 90 per cent of Gaza’s inhabitants share Hamas’s hatred of Jews highlights the risks setting a low bar for admitting Gazans to Australia creates.

That makes Burgess’s statement that “rhetorically” supporting Hamas is “no problem” careless at best, utterly irresponsible at worst. It also makes the claim that it is racist to be concerned about that statement ludicrous. It is hardly racist to oppose the entry into this country of genocidal racists.

But the primary responsibility lies not with Burgess but with the government. It has, quite rightly, stressed that anti-Semitism has no place in Australia. How then could it possibly issue visas to people who sympathise, however “rhetorically”, with a movement based on a psychotic hostility to Jews? Is this country’s social cohesion worth so little that it deserves to be shredded for the sake of a few votes?

If that is what we have come to, Australia’s Jews, who have lived here entirely peacefully since European settlement’s very first days, have every right to feel betrayed. And so, regardless of race, creed or religion, does every other Australian.