To end all October 7s, we MUST humiliate the "Palestinians"

"Magnanimous in victory" is one of the finest principles of the civilised victor. It is not, however, universal. It's applicability depends on the culture of the vanquished. If the vanquished enemy, for example, holds to the principle of humiliating an enemy as the seal of victory, they would expect nothing less to be done to themselves to confirm their defeat. To treat such an enemy magnanimously is to do nothing less than to hand victory right back to them.

As distasteful, even repulsive, as it might be to Jews and other civilised people, humiliating an enemy is the seal of victory to all who have waged war on Israel since her refounding, and massacred Jews both before and since. Their holy scripture, the Qur'an, commands:

Fight those who have been given the Scripture [Jews and Christians] who believe not in Allah and the Last Day, and do not forbid that which Allah and his messenger have forbidden, and do not acknowledge the religion of truth [Islam] until they pay the Jizya and feel themselves subdued. (Qur'an 9:29)

Jews and Christians so fought are brought to the point of paying the stay-of-execution money, Jizya, extorted from them after they have surrendered to the Muslims in war and "chosen" to become dhimmis over joining the barbarians or death. The defeated must pay this in person, which is how the stipulation that they "feel themselves subdued" can be given effect. It means approaching the Muslims on all fours and handing the money up to them, while being kicked and spat into the mouth. Jizya, humiliation, is the Muslim equivalent of "magnanimous in victory," which even then is a mercy over immediate beheading.

And the aim of this humiliation? Dr Andrew Bostom quotes Ahmad ibn Muhammad Ibn 'Ajibah's exegesis of the operative verse:

[The dhimmi] is commanded to put his soul, good fortune and desires to death.  Above all he should kill the love of life, leadership and honor. [The dhimmi] is to invert the longings of his soul, he is to load it down more heavily than it can bear until it is completely submissive. Thereafter nothing will be unbearable for him. He will be indifferent to subjugation or might. Poverty and wealth will be the same to him; praise and insult will be the same; preventing and yielding will be the same; lost and found will be the same. Then, when all things are the same, it [the soul] will be submissive and yield willingly what it should give. (Emphasis original)

If Hamas should finally hand over their captives—they consider them all, even newborn babies, prisoners of war—and such handover is by no means certain, even if they are not in a position to make a humiliating spectacle out of the event, in their eyes, Israel's humiliation is assured in that most, if not all, of the survivors will be female and in relatively good physical condition: Jewish men could not protect their women from capture; Muslims, after having their way with them, "protected" them by not killing them, of course not all the females. They have to show that the power of life and death is at their pleasure. It all makes sense in the Muslim mind.

Of course, there is nothing that Israel can do about this grotesque calculus, but it can and must be countered so that in the balance of humiliation, the enemy must end up more humiliated than the Jews they will humiliate.

There are many ways to accomplish this. The easiest and most effective, we would suggest, to drop thousands of leaflets from the air, each bearing a high-resolution image of Yahya Sinwar's head with a huge hole in his skull, the caption saying simply: "Salah ad-Din, masha-Allah" in Hebrew. Sinwar's brain is destroyed, the brain that Israel, in her kindness, had healed. This will remind the "Palestinians" how magnanimous Israel had been before victory, including raining down thousands of leaflets to save them, and that they blew it. This will sting badly, but many will still be defiant, quash their feelings and chant victory.

This is where their own humiliation of the Jews at earlier captive releases must be turned against them. Israel must not allow the Gazans to get away with blaring their gaudy triumphal music across earlier hand-over events, for it is a memory that will give them succour forever hereafter. There are ways, unwise to share publicly, of turning that tactic against them so they, and not the Jews, end up humiliated. This puts an end to future October 7s.

Picture credit:

IDF