Give the Qur'an to Jews!

Part 4

Déjà vu all over again, only this time, it’s worse

In this final part, I should like to return to the near-panic efforts to dissociate the Palestinians from the barbaric horrors of the Simchat Torah Massacre. On the one hand, there is the deadly amnesia of so many Israelis, on the other, there is often a sidelining of the most important implication of a statement just made, especially on the part of otherwise courageous Western observers, but on the part of Israelis, too.   

Dr Nikos Sotirakopoulos of the Ayn Rand Institute reminded us that the massacre on 7 October had many well-known forerunners. He offers a list of jihad mass-murder outrages that all seem to have been forgotten:

There was no atrocity that we saw on Saturday [7 October] that has not already happened in the history of Palestinian terrorism. For example, we witnessed the spectacle of raiding communities. This had happened before and it had happened many times. One example is the Kiryat Shmona Massacre when eighteen people, including eleven children, were massacred in the 70s. How did the Palestinian Authority reward the people who committed this atrocity? They gave them a seat in the Executive Committee of the PLO. This was not an an act of random people; this was something that the Palestinian Authority rewarded.

We were shocked on Saturday by seeing the Palestinians mutilating dead bodies. Have we seen this before? We’ve seen this before in 1972, when Black September made the terrorist attack in the Munich Olympics.

We were shocked by seeing children being targeted, but we’ve seen this before. We’ve seen this in the 1974 Ma’alot Massacre, where the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine machine-gunned children at point-blank [range].

And we were shocked on Saturday when we saw that elderly people were targeted and weaker people were targeted. But again, we’ve seen this before. Remember 1985, the hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro, where Palestinian terrorists executed a 69 year-old Jew who was in a wheelchair, and they threw him into the sea with his wheelchair.

So again, terrorism and brutality is not an accident. It is a conscious choice by the Palestinian movement and it has been a conscious choice at least since the 1950s and even more from the 1960s.

The latest Palestinian answer to whether they agree with the Simchat Torah Massacre of 7 October 2023 goes something like: “Israel has been massacring Palestinians for seventy-five years.” Fine, let’s go with that. Seventy-five years takes us back to 1948. Firstly, there were no Palestinians before 1965, so Israel could not have been massacring them. Secondly, even if we concede the Arab Muslims of Mandatory Palestine before they came to be fashioned into “the Palestinians,” it was them massacring the Jews, and not the other way round: the Arab killing sprees, massacres and pogroms of 1947-48; 1937-38; 1936; 1933; 1929; and 1920-21. For sure, by mid-November 1937, the Jews had had enough and started giving back as good as they got. The Palestinian apologists and supporters are keen to invoke history, but only as far as it suits them. Such is to be expected of them.

There has been much talk of how the near-universal empathy and support for Israel in the wake of the Simchat Torah Massacre got drowned out within forty-eight hours when the Muslim propaganda machine mobilised thousands of Palestinians, Muslims and woke activists onto the streets of Western cities to condemn Israel’s “war crimes” in Gaza, where she is said to “massacre thousands of civilians,” the Simcha Torah Massacre all but forgotten, or when brought up, rabidly denounced as “Zionist lies.” Yet, this is to overlook that many otherwise decent people in the West, including in Israel, have had a very rude awakening. Since 7 October they have been “on a journey,” as some of them put it. The question is how far will they go on that journey? How far will 1400 deaths, countless rapes, 4000 injuries, 250 captives and massive destruction across a wide area move the deluded towards reality? Onker Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute has something to say about this:

Good people are horrified by what they've seen happen on Saturday [7 October] and in the stories coming out now. It’s true that we’ve seen all of this before. What should be horrifying, but is not, is that there's a logic to that. Given their goals, it makes sense of what they’re doing. If your goal is, as Hamas’s founding goal is, to wipe out Israel, that doesn’t mean just wiping out Israel’s soldiers. It’s not as though they’re going to just attack military bases. It’s to wipe out every single Israeli: soldiers, civilians, women, elderly, children. It’s the complete destruction of Israel. If that is [their] goal, and if people would take seriously that that is their goal, then this is part of the means to that goal.

The corruption is that people are fighting for that goal, and more fundamentally then, it’s not even the goal of wiping out Israel. It’s a means to establishing an Islamic theocracy. The Hamas is not different from the regime in Iran, is not different from the Taliban. What we saw when they were elected is civil war with their political opponent—although they’re not really political—another military faction, another gang. You have anarchy, in effect two gangs fighting it out. They drove them out so that they can obtain a dictatorship in the Gaza Strip.

What is inhuman about them is their goal and, yes, if your goal is inhuman, you’ll use inhuman means. But the idea of what needs to be denounced is that they targeted children, versus what should be denounced is Hamas. As an organisation it should not exist. It’s evil in its founding documents and founding purpose, and if people in the West are unwilling to say that, and to say that unequivocally, they can’t view themselves as, “I’m against these atrocities.”

Mosab Hassan Yousef, "Son of Hamas," makes the same point:

Hamas wants to annihilate the State of Israel in order to build their Islamic State. It doesn't stop there. They're looking for a global Islamic State. This is Hamas. [If] they [Western activists] want [to be] pro-Palestine, I have no problem. Do it peacefully, but in the meantime, make sure that you condemn a terrorist organisation that wants to annihilate a race, a religion, a nation, a nation that has contributed so much to the human life, so much to human evolution. This is the Jewish people. And if we are not compassionate towards this, seeing things for what they are, then we have lost sight, then we are actually shooting ourselves in the head. This is what we are doing.

They did not only kidnap living beings, they kidnapped a corpse to bargain for money and prisoner exchange. This is not even terrorists. This is Dark Age savages, unheard of reality, that we are witnessing in the 21st century and people in the Free World are failing to condemn them. We are failing to condemn this. Shame on you pro-Palestine movement. You don't have the capacity to say, "Condemn Hamas," Hamas, a terrorist group.

In short, it is time for moral courage, bucketfuls of moral courage. Evil is no longer an abstraction; it has a face, and it isn’t a pretty one. I have argued throughout this series that the killing of Jews is not particular to Hamas and that they are just the currently most direct expression of the fundamental Islamic doctrine of extermination of the Jews, the theme of over sixty verses in the Qur’an and of many hadith, including the notorious genocide hadith:

The Day of Judgement will not come about 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. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

After 7 October, it will be very hard to “interpret” this hadith away, as some Western apologists for Islam have tried to do. The equivocation that Ghate refers to above runs parallel to a tendency to nip a train of thought in the bud before it reveals its uncomfortable implications. Consider, for example, the intrepid British journalist Douglas Murray, being interviewed by Piers Morgan:

Many of the Hamas fighters, terrorists, who were found dead or captured alive after that day, were found to have plans on them which had extraordinarily detailed issues (sic, information) about who lived in which house. There’s one kibbutz where the man who was in charge of security in the kibbutz, the terrorists went to his house first and killed him and his family, and then went door to door elsewhere. How did they have all of this knowledge, literally, family-by-family, door-to-door? It was because some of the people they had given their trust to had sold them out, had given information over to Hamas to get them killed. Now that is going to have in Israel a seismic effect in the years ahead.

Is the most profound implication Murray can draw out of this feeding of information to Hamas that it will have a seismic effect in Israel? That is not exactly a stellar insight. Murray and Morgan then sideline themselves further into commenting on irrelevant Stalinist has-been Jeremy Corbin and his trade union side-kick Len McClusky. What both Murray and Morgan quickly ran away from is the implication of “the people [Palestinians] they [Jews] had given their trust to [having] sold them out.” Murray was, of course, referring to the over 18,000 Gazan Palestinians allowed to enter and leave Gaza on Israeli Work Permits. Trust given on the assumption of reciprocity is a story as old as Israel itself. To borrow the terse prose of Daniel Greenfield, “Israeli communities foolishly allowed workers from Gaza into their homes, grew fond of them and believed all their talk about peace. Then they watched their children be murdered by them.”

For this the Palestinians and Arab Muslims in Israel cannot be blamed; their way of being is directly informed by their marshal religion and their sacred texts are there for all to read. Give them their way and they will have it. If there is nothing wrong with Islam, as the near-universal reluctance to call it out suggests, then there can be nothing wrong with Hamas, ISIS, the Taliban, Al-Qaida, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and all the rest of them.

There is ignorance and naïvety in Israel, to be sure, but there is also cynicism and idiocy, such as that of former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid: “We need to make the civilian population in Gaza realise that they can live a different life, to pressure Hamas to stop shooting at Israel. To that end, we have increased the number of permits for working in Israel that are issued to the residents of Gaza.” I say idiocy for want of a better word, for wrapped up in Yair Lapid's idiocy is the same dismissive arrogance that we see across Israel’s Left-wing elite. It does not matter what happened in the past under identical circumstances, they know better and will not be told otherwise.

Six years ago, in 2017, Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman made Hamas “an offer that no sane entity would turn down.” Lieberman had offered that Israel would build a seaport, an airport, an industrial zone to provide 40,000 desperately-needed jobs, and global investments that would turn Gaza into the “Singapore of the Middle East,” forgetting what Palestinians had managed to do to the “Paris of the Middle East” just to the north of Israel. Lieberman said, quoted in The Times of Israel:

The moment Hamas gives up on tunnels and rockets, we will be the first ones to invest and build [Gaza’s residents] a seaport, an airport, and industrial zones by the Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings. …We are able to immediately create about 40,000 jobs for the residents of Gaza.

Lieberman’s offer, according to the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, was “part of an effort to create pressure on Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas.” Palestinian writer Abdul Ghani Al-Shami wrote in Quds Press, quoting Ibrahim Al-Madhoun:

This proposal, although ridiculous, demonstrates the extent of despair that Lieberman and his government have reached in dealing with the Gaza Strip, until they reached the situation by enticing them to improve the economic situation. …This is a proposal that is unacceptable to Hamas, which refuses to turn its fundamental issue of land and human liberation into an economic issue. (electronic translation)

Of course, Al-Shami was right. The proposal shows no understanding at all of how a Muslim’s, and especially a Palestinian’s, mind works. Lieberman does not see that in the universe of Muslims, the Palestinians enjoy the hallowed status of the ones who “martyr” themselves to restore “Muslim lands” and shoulder the greatest share of the obligation on Muslims to kill all Jews in the world.[1] Such a proposal was dead before it was issued. Besides, trying to entice Palestinians into making “this life” more attractive than the “next life” will be rejected with contempt. Furthermore, Palestinian misery is Hamas and the PA's wealth. Suffering Palestinians bring billions in Western donations into their pockets. They had no intension of giving their gravy train up that easily, as Lieberman quickly found out.

The Hamas responses, one after another, were swift and severe. The jihad mass-murder organ’s spokesman, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, declared, “If we wanted to turn the Gaza Strip into Singapore, we could have achieved that with our own hands.” Hamas, and the Palestinians, have far loftier priorities than mere Singaporian prosperity. Had Hamas acquiesced in Lieberman’s proposal to take away the one thing that gives meaning to being Palestinian, first in line for Jew-killing, the Palestinians would have turned on Hamas and destroyed them.

The world was baffled when the Palestinian Authority rejected President Trump’s $50 billion economic development package with such contempt that they didn’t even bother reading it. When Yasser Afarat signed the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians were out to linch him, backing down only after he had assured them that he had lied to the Israelis. “Hamas and the Palestinian Authority share a deadly determination to sacrifice as many Palestinians as possible in their war to destroy Israel,” wrote Gatestone Institute contributor, Bassam Tawil in 2017.

With all this history to learn from, the genius Yair Lapid presumed to make the Palestinians “realise that they can have a different life.” Professor Chaim Hames, Rector of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, imagines that ridding Gaza of Hamas will afford the Palestinians in Gaza the chance to “start anew,” proving this particular delusion, that Ben Gurion shared, to be a great leveller. Did anyone seriously think that Hamas, a mere six years ago, and the PA a mere three years ago, rejecting offers of glittering economic prosperity with utter contempt, were going to let their people take up Work Permits in Israel for the jobs? Yes, most of the Left-wing elite genuinely did think so. Those who warned against this suicidal insanity, most prominently so the religious Zionists, were ridden roughshod over and excluded from crucial cabinet meetings.

Yet, to return to Douglas Murray and his portrayal of the Hamas infiltrators as betrayers of trust, this does beg several questions: Why does Murray fail to mention that these Work Permits were also found on some of the Hamas terrorists shot dead on 7 October? Murray automatically assumes that the Palestinians the Jews had "given their trust to” were not themselves Hamas killers, but up to the point of their “betrayal” of their Jewish employers—and one can only guess at Murray’s assumptions here—were innocent Palestinian civilians. It doesn’t strike Murray as odd that ordinary domestic workers, gardeners and the like, were all capable of providing detailed house plans to such a standard as to be of operational use in battle.

The horrifying monster inexorably rising across the path of Murray’s otherwise honest reporting, is the shakiness of the whole idea of “innocent Palestinian civilians.” Western commentators, even when honest and of good heart, lack the moral courage to go all the way to wherever the facts may lead. The greater likelihood of being correct in suspecting any random Palestinian of meaning Jews harm implies that such commentators, labouring under the self-perception of being well-informed, good people, need to re-examine everything that they hitherto believed about themselves and their capacity for sound judgement. Douglas Murray does not have as far to travel as, say, Maryam Namazie, yet the need is daunting enough that he would evade the questions arising from his own honest observations. It is an odd thing risking your life running into a war zone only to then run away from yourself.

In the name of 1400 Israelis, we need to know who, exactly, these “workers” were and what role, precisely, they played in the 7 October jihad attack. This is a very serious question, made that much more serious by the Israeli government’s unseemly haste in “expelling” those Gazan Work Permit holders still in Israel after the Israeli assaults on Gaza had commenced, in full knowledge that many, if not all of them, need to be detained and interrogated. Israeli Work Permits discovered on dead Hamas terrorists gave Israel 18,000 Hamas hostages on a platter. All 252 Israeli captives could have been released by now as well as an identity crisis set off amongst the Palestinians. It is inconceivable that the Israeli government had not thought of this. Why were these thousands of terror suspects allowed to return to Gaza? Douglas Murray does not go anywhere near such questions. Daniel Pipes reports that:

The security establishment approved the entry of 8,000 West Bank workers to Israel, mostly to engage in agricultural work. It did so in response to Israel's agriculture minister assuring his colleagues that the workers had been vetted and posed no danger. That thousands of workers from Gaza had spied on Israel and made themselves complicit in the Oct. 7 massacre seemed blithely to be forgotten.

Regardless of whether these assumed workers had been vetted or not, the message this sends to the Palestinians is: no matter how many Jews they massacre, even if they are at war with Israel, the Jews will still let them in. This is not idiocy on the part of Israeli Ministers; this is active subversion. Murray further offers the following insight:

People need to realise you had this situation with the Nazis where they also were a genocidal anti-Semitic organisation, but they tried to cover their crimes up. Hamas are actually proud of them and they’ve said they will do them until the whole world is clear of Jews. So I suggest we take that seriously. I think that Israel is taking it seriously. I hope they continue to take it seriously, but I think the world should take it seriously.

While one can and should get behind Murray’s suggestion, it is peculiar that he expects the world to take Hamas’s threat seriously because they’ve shown themselves to be a nastier lot than the Nazis. People have been warning about the barbarism of Islam since the chroniclers of Late Antiquity, through the Middle Ages, the early modern period, the age of global empires, colonialism and, indeed, throughout the contemporary period. They did not need to wait for a Hamas to show themselves up against the Nazis before they took jihad seriously. They knew that the imperative to render “the whole world clear of Jews” is commanded in the Islamic holy texts, is incumbent on all Muslims and is abundantly demonstrated over Islam’s long and blood-soaked history. Of those who have been warning about such events, I, for one, oscillate between sadness and anger that it had to come to this.

And now what? What, exactly, does “take it seriously” mean? If it doesn’t mean an immediate halt to all Muslim immigration to non-Muslim countries, then it isn’t serious. If it doesn’t mean making the practise of Islam, even to the smallest degree, impossible in non-Muslim countries, then it isn’t serious. If it doesn’t mean the expulsion of all Muslims from non-Muslim countries on the slightest suspicion of jihad sympathies, then it isn’t serious (where they go is not our problem; we are not the ones out to commit genocide—oh, yes, the "collective punishment thing." We're about to get to that). To bring the focus closer to home, Mosab Hassan Yousef remarks:

They [Hamas] are the ones waging the war. If they don't want war, if they don't want to die in Gaza and cause the deaths of tens of thousands of people, ...take your guns, keep your uniform if you don't want to be humiliated, get on a boat and get the hell out of Gaza. This is my suggestion to Hamas. The honest truth: they are not willing to do this. They prefer to see the entire Gaza burnt down to ashes before they give up their ideology. This is the true nature of Hamas.

What is most astonishing about US demands that Israel allow “humanitarian aid” into Gaza, i.e., resupply their enemy during war, in other words, commit treason against yourself, is that the Israeli government accepts it. If the Israeli government bends to pressure from people who obviously do not want them to win, then they are not serious. Yousef offers the following sobering reflection:

You know, we could have dealt with Hamas when I first brought the information to the intelligence service communities and I said Hamas is about to take over Gaza. I was the first to report that, and they did not take it seriously.

One of the pressures the "international community" brings to bear on Israel is the allegation of Israeli “collective punishment” on the “innocent civilians” in her Gaza war against Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. In Islam, the concept of the individual does not exist, since the most granular social unit recognised and understood is the family, above which is the congregation centred on a Friday mosque, led by a religious official who disseminates the tribal ruler’s directives in a sermon that everyone must attend in person, above the mosque is the tribe and above which is a single, all-powerful male: the chieftain, emir, king, etc., who is the only individual in the entire society. The stratifications and their appellations may vary from society to society and over time, but they are basically the same, as is the cast of mind resulting from it and sustaining it, hence Shari’a.

Shari’a strongly recommends that wayward children be killed before they bring shame upon the family. A husband may do to his wife absolutely anything he wants and she is obliged to always obey, on pain of a beating or instant divorce. The concept of rape does not exist in Islam. For a broken marriage to be restored, Shari’a punishes the man by pimping out his former wife before the marriage can be restored. She has no say in the matter and must subject herself to rape as a punishment to him.[2]

When non-Muslims allege collective punishment of Palestinians, they have no idea what they are talking about. When Muslims feign outrage over collective punishment, they feign outrage about something that has absolutely no meaning to them. They do not understand the concept. Yet they know exactly what they are doing, for such supposed outrage is purely a propaganda attack. They have identified the charge of collective punishment as one of our vulnerabilities. They see us rack ourselves over it, and they press that button continuously.

In general, jihad is a communal obligation upon a Muslim congregation, meaning that every mosque, without exception, is a terrorist recruitment centre, in whatever country that mosque might be. Jihad generally being a communal obligation means that as long as some members of a congregation go out to kill infidels, the obligation is lifted from the rest and the entire congregation is absolved. It is therefore in everyone’s interest to make sure that prospective jihad mass-murderers (sometimes called "martyrdom-seekers") succeed. All helpers of jihad murderers enjoy elevated social standing and recognition, bringing honour and pride upon their families. Supporting the family of a jihad murderer is as good as supporting the murderer himself. The Palestinian Authority’s pay-for-slay policy supports not only the jihad murderers, but also their families. Israel is not entitled to complain about the PA’s pay-for-slay policy when Israel herself allows Shari’a to be practised on her own soil, illustrating, yet again, the consequences for the Jews of not studying Islam.

Shari’a determines that apostates must be killed because they betray the tribe, i.e., all the Muslims. Those who leave Islam thus remain subject to Shari’a jurisdiction despite already having left Islam, meaning they remain subject to Muslim collective ownership. Since Shari’a declares all Muslims to be permanently at war with all non-Muslims—just to be clear, even when there is no fighting—to leave Islam is to simultaneously commit sin, treason and desertion. Apostasy is not understood merely as leaving Islam, but as both throwing Allah's favour right back in his face and joining the enemy. Muslims are obligated to fight and kill anyone and everyone “who believes not in Allah.” It is a grave insult to “the best of people” when one of their own freely chooses to abandon them in favour of “the worst of created beings,” yet this is not nearly as egregious as a Muslim freely choosing to become a Jew.

The Shari’a concept of punishment is collective, not only in space, but also in time. In the wake of the Simchat Torah Massacre, exasperated Muslims, and especially Palestinians, confronted with the jihad mass-murder of Israeli babies, pull their hair out trying to make civilised people understand that they, i.e., the Jews, have killed us, the Palestinians, for seventy-five years. What is the problem? By the same token, the IDF only blowing up an individual jihad terrorist’s house is meaningless, because his family protected him and his family has multiple houses: his mother’s house; his brothers’ houses; his sisters’ houses; his uncles’ houses; his cousins’ houses, etc. All the family’s houses need to be blown up for the punishment to be effective, else Israel is not serious. The IDF will simply be seen as weak and too afraid to punish them, thereby encouraging more jihad murder.

Similarly, it is not enough to shoot dead a jihad terrorist. His entire family has to be executed and his local mosque demolished. To do less than execute a Palestinian jihad mass-murderer’s entire family is to be a joke in their eyes, and a guarantee that jihad mass-murder will continue. If the Israelis cannot bring themselves to execute a jihad mass-murderer’s entire family, then at the very least, expel them all from the land. Then the Israelis will be taken seriously. Naturally, the civilised reader might be disgusted to read such words. Never mind. With each successive massacre, the disgust will grow a little less and the realism a little more. May it not take too many massacres.

Zionists have not understood that when most of the Jews were expelled from their homeland, it was surrounded by Roman pagans, later replaced by Byzantine Christians and Persian Zoroastrians. Finally, and most significantly, by the time the Jews returned, both their homeland and all surrounding lands had been conquered and colonised by barbarian Arabs who, within a few centuries, had devised a unifying imperial ideology, Islam, that had standardised and preserved their barbarian values and martial ways for over a thousand years. It had, in the intervening centuries, become necessary for the Jews to not only study Torah, but also to study the Qur’an, a book much preoccupied with Jews and the killing of Jews. Without knowing the Muslim holy texts, the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Hidayah, etc., Jews will not understand that they are dealing with their eternal mortal enemy. They will be unable to hold onto their homeland, for in all this time the Jews have done little to safeguard themselves from that enemy and much to facilitate the furtherance of his schemes.

Many, including Douglas Murray and Daniel Pipes, contend that it is not our place to tell Israel what to do. Yes and no. To begin with, Israel is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and indeed would be better able to do so if she simply ignored “the international community.” Yet, while it might not be our place to lecture either Israel or the Jews on what they should do, they are clearly struggling with their demons. Those at a distance and with the interests of Israel and the Jews at heart, owe it to their professed friends in their beleaguered land to offer their best ideas for Israel to do with as she sees fit. After all, both Israel and her supporters around the world recognise that civilisation as a whole depends on Israel prevailing over those who would destroy her and kill every Jew, a higher priority for Palestinians than escaping the squalor their ruling gangs confine them to.

Dr Andrew G. Bostom, in a new, updated Preface to his phenomenal scholarly accomplishment, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, recalls an excerpt from the khutbah (Friday sermon) by Sheikh Mohammad Abu Sada delivered on 2 October 2015 (the 828th anniversary of Salah ad-Din’s entry to Jerusalem) at the Abdullah Azzam Mosque in Gaza:

The Al-Aqsa Mosque is expecting our mujahideen [jihad warriors] and martyrdom-seekers. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is waiting. Know that even though the occupiers [Jews] have defiled the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the heroes of Gaza are making preparations, and they are digging tunnels that will enable them to reach Al-Aqsa. One day, they will emerge in the courtyards, the squares, the streets, and alleys [of Jerusalem], proclaiming ‘Allah Akbar,’ and they will issue a call to arms against the brothers of apes and pigs. […] Al-Aqsa expects the heroes of the West Bank to launch Jihad, and to kill all the settlers… We shall emerge victorious, Allah willing, because Allah is with us, because it was promised by the Prophet Muhammad, and because there are mujahideen, and martyrdom-seekers among us… We shall emerge victorious, Allah willing, because we have among us people who don explosive belts, awaiting their journey to Paradise, to meet the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions. With all these, we shall emerge victorious, Allah willing. […] We await a decision of our leader, who will say to us: “You will be praying your afternoon prayer in Tel Aviv, Allah willing.”

The “apes and pigs” epithet in reference to Jews in this Muslim pre-mediaeval fantasy and exhortation is found in Qur’an 5:60. That Israel and the Jews face a religious war is a point that many have made. But it is also because it is a religious war that the secular leaders of Israel dismiss sermons and utterances such as the above as nonsensical and warranting only to be ignored. No doubt, there have been and continue to be many such explicit open source warnings, all ignored, always ignored, since before modern Israel was even founded. It is as if acknowledging that your enemy is motivated by religion implies your approval of religion.

Finally, the persistent (and non-sensical) objection to so-called collective punishment is that if we do that, “we become like them.” This is simply an excuse to avoid facing up to an extremely disturbing reality, that to preserve civilisation, it is sometimes necessary to act in uncivilised ways. This does not make us “like them,” not even remotely. We do it to stop genocide; they do it to commit genocide. There is a slight difference. Some manage to see this difference through being brutally honest with themselves, others find easier means. One IDF paratrooper in the elite Golani Brigade, navigates these moral and ethical challenges this way:

For me, my religious beliefs help me a lot. That’s how I remain human, because often its very easy to think like a killer. You’re not killing all the time, but you’re always carrying guns, arresting terrorists, and it’s very easy to start enjoying that. Religion reminds you that it’s not a pleasure. You have to do it, but you have no right to take pleasure in it. When you do take pleasure, it means something is going wrong.

The Muslim mass-murderers of 7 October were high, elated, ecstatic, orgasmic, exhilarated, overjoyed, gleeful, excited, animated, jubilant, exultant, euphoric, rapturous, delirious and frenzied, as they stabbed, chopped, sliced, burnt, shot and raped their way through sleeping communities. The IDF soldier’s message seems simple enough.

Notes:

1. With such a status, the Palestinians need to learn nothing more. They are consequently the most uncivilised of Arabs, the most entitled and the most demanding. Any Arab leader who does not immediately drop everything to attend to their demands is stabbing them in the back, and they think nothing of assassinating him, even if he's provided them with succour for decades. Attributes such as these led to the Arabs at large despising them. It surprises only the Americans that no one wants to take in any Gazans.
2. See Quran 2:210 and the Shari'a manual Reliance of the Traveller, Book n7.7

Picture credits:

TabulaRogeriana.jpg: Al-Idrisi (original map), Konrad Miller (current map) *derivative work: PHGCOM (talk) (rotation) - TabulaRogeriana.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7812386

“Únos Černohorky” (Kidnapping of a Montenegrin Woman), replica of a painting by Jaroslav Čermák, 1865.

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Quotations in graphic are from:

Qur'an 8:60

Maimonides

Frant. Vl. Kodym, Obrazy z dějin Turků dospělejší mládeži (Prague: Nákladem kněhkupectví Mikuláše a Knappa, 1879), 7–8.