For those of us who are not well versed in Islamist ideologies or in anti-Semitism, absorbing the scale of the violence and the subsequent celebrations in response to it has been difficult. We are so used to minor transgressions being labelled “racist” or “bigoted” that when an outbreak of genocidal racism occurs, we may feel ill-equipped to process it.
But for those who have been studying these ideologies, such scenes do not come as a shock. Writing in Quillette this week, US historian Jeffrey Herf explains the recent mass murder of Israeli civilians is the logical outcome of a specific ideology that fundamentally revolves around Jew hatred.
The ideology of Hamas – the terrorist organisation that carried out the attacks on October 7 – fuses Islamism with Nazism, explains Herf. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, Amin al-Husseini, joined forces with the Nazis.
Al-Husseini met with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials, and helped establish a Muslim wing of the Schutzstaffel (SS). In a German propaganda newsreel shared by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, you can watch Hitler declare the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” was part of the “struggle against the Jews”.
And that when the German army had extended all the way to the Middle East, Germany would issue “an assurance to the Arab world that the hour of liberation was at hand”. It would then be al-Husseini’s “responsibility to unleash the Arab action that he has secretly prepared”.
After the war, al-Husseini escaped prosecution for war crimes, but he was welcomed into Eqypt as a hero. “Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna.
Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Today’s Hamas militants are the ideological descendants of al-Husseini, the Nazi collaborator who plotted with Hitler to eradicate the Jews. In its 1988 Charter, Hamas call for the complete destruction of Israel and explicitly rejects any possibility of a two-state solution. It proclaims: “Until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
This genocidal racism has not stopped some Westerners from sympathising with or even supporting Hamas explicitly. This week, the official social media accounts for the Black Lives Matter movement posted graphics glorifying Hamas paragliders above the slogan “I Stand With Palestine”.
On X, Sydney University academic Nick Reimer wrote that: “No progressive should feel the need to publicly condemn any choices by the Palestinian resistance. Doing so just adds to the perception that their cause is unjust.”
As news broke that babies had been massacred at a southern Israeli kibbutzim demonstrators in Melbourne clapped jubilantly when speakers declared “Palestinian liberation” would come “by any means necessary.”
The same group of protesters was filmed chanting “From the River to the Sea”, a rallying cry that derives from Article 12 of the Hamas Covenant asserting that Muslims hold a sacred entitlement to the land stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. This claim, according to the Covenant, comes with a responsibility to undertake “religious purification” of the territory. In other words – genocide.
It is understandable that many Australians are unfamiliar with the ideology of Hamas. Middle Eastern politics can be hard to follow, and many of us know that the history of the Holy Land is intensely complicated. Yet the events of October 7 were not complicated. Hamas terrorists deliberately targeted Jewish civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Mothers and babies were slaughtered. Innocent youths attending a music festival were massacred. Entire families were wiped out.
Despite these atrocities some members of our own Parliaments cannot bring themselves to condemn Hamas, even after the confirmation of an Australian fatality.
Jenny Leong, the NSW member for Newtown, has shared online content created by the Palestinian Action Group Sydney that references “75 years of occupation”. It’s worth noting that Gaza and the West Bank came under occupation in 1967 – 56 years ago. The reference to “75 years of occupation” dates back to the creation of the Israeli state, meaning this group aligns with Hamas’s objective of ethnically cleansing Israel.
The moral imbecility has not stop there, however. The NSW Greens opposed a motion brought by Labor condemning the “horrific attack by Hamas” on the basis that they did not support the right of Israel to defend itself.
International law acknowledges a nation’s entitlement to self-defence, while explicitly disallowing death squads from orchestrating the killing of civilians and the abduction of vulnerable individuals. When there is a lack of condemnation of such war crimes and a failure to condemn Hamas, it may appear as if the NSW Greens are implicitly endorsing the targeting of Israeli civilians solely because of their nationality.
Our federal Greens have displayed similar depravity. Mehreen Faruqi, the deputy leader of the Greens, has been more incensed by a light display than the targeted violence against civilians. “One colonial government supporting another. What a disgrace,” she tweeted following the decision that the Australian parliament be illuminated in blue and white to support Israel.
But it’s not as if Faruqi is not interested in fascism. Her social media feed is filled with denunciations of neo-Nazis and fascists. But her interest seems to stop at symbols and words. When it emerged that Dominic Perrottet had worn a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday as a satirical joke, Faruqi tweeted: “This is foul. Fascist extremism is not a joke and this revelation betrays an extraordinary lack of empathy and judgment from the premier. Deeply offensive stuff.”
Faruqi apparently knows what fascism is. But her condemnation stops when Jewish children are murdered in their beds.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of online magazine Quillette.
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