Who sympathises with the Palestinians and how?*

*By Andrzej Koraszewski, 22 October 2023

https://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/who-sympathizes-with-the-palestinians-and-how-1

The Soviet Union sympathised with the Arabs, supported their national liberation struggle with good advice, weapons, instructors, training, education for their cadres, and provision of logistical support. The Arabs did not want any Palestinian state, they wanted to murder the Jews and divide Israel among themselves. Neither Egypt, nor Syria, nor Jordan, nor Iraq, nor Saudi Arabia promised any Palestine to anyone, in fact, they encouraged Palestinian Arabs to kill Jews for Allah. Refugees from the Palestinian Mandate were not granted citizenship in Arab countries and were kept in camps maintained by the United Nations. They were allowed to arm themselves to fight the Jews, and they were killed when they demanded the right to work and a normal life.

Bassem Eid, a Palestinian rights activist, writes:

For many years, the leading Arab powers used the Palestinian people and the conflict with Israel to serve their own goals, generally repression at home and aggression abroad. Again and again, the Palestinians were asked to serve as cannon fodder against Israel to serve the agenda of the Arab states, which refused to consider peace with Israel. Today, much of the Arab world seeks peace and a new engagement with other nations, while Iran has embarked upon an ideological crusade to dominate the region.

The Palestinian people do not have one face only. The self-proclaimed leaders of the “Palestinians” were people like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al-Husseini, of whom the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, said in 1946:

Hitler’s and Mussolini’s defeat did not frighten you. Your hair did not turn grey of fright, and you are still full of life and fight. What a hero, what a miracle of a man. We wish to know what the Arab youth, Cabinet Ministers, rich men, and princes of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tunis, Morocco, and Tripoli are going to do to be worthy of this hero. Yes, this hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin Al-Husseini will continue the struggle.

From the beginning the Soviet Union preferred Abu Nidal, (about whom Wikipedia writes, among other things: “The Eastern Bloc, and above all Romania, Hungary and Poland, offered shelter to Abu Nidal and members of his group and traded arms with them. The headquarters of the SAS Foreign Trade and Investment Company, owned by Abu Nidal, was located in Warsaw. It was abolished in 1987 at the behest of the United States”), who reportedly ordered the murder of several comrades-in-arms, and reportedly planned an assassination of Arafat, with whom he competed for power over the Palestinians. To this day, we do not know everything about his dark deeds. Like Arafat, he was an airplane hijacker, but Yasser Arafat won, and it was to him that the world handed the keys to the Palestinian house and entrusted the fate of the Palestinians.

This sceptre of power over the Palestinians was handed to him after Arafat started the civil war in Jordan, after he was allowed to withdraw his armed troops from Jordan to Lebanon, after he started the civil war in Lebanon and brought about the destruction of that country, after America and Europe saved him from defeat at the hands of the Israeli army, and U.S. ships carried his army to Tunisia.

The Saudis feared that the Iranians would hijack the “Palestinian cause” and gain leadership among Islamic nations. Al Qaeda and Bin Laden didn’t come out of nowhere. It was a murderous competition to see who was the best murderer, who hated the Jews the most, who could strike a stronger blow against the infidels.

The Palestinians were needed by the Arabs as dogs of war, by the West as proof of their concern for peace. Egyptian dissident Husein Abubakr Mansour writes:

“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been framed in terms that condone or necessitate the indiscriminate killing of Jews. For more unambiguous actors such as Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, freeing Palestine simply means the total eradication of Israel without qualification. This is not a polemical point, but a basic reality and fact of our lives that demands scrutiny.

The West paid for the education of the Palestinians, entrusting that education to the Arab Nazis. From time to time we heard about racist content in Palestinian textbooks, but were silent because we were afraid of accidentally linking it to Islam. French Muslim philosopher Abdennour Bidar wrote in his “Letter to My Muslim Brothers” in 2014:

This problem is that of the roots of evil. Where do the crimes of this so-called “Islamic State” come from? I shall tell you, my friend. You will not be pleased with what I have to say, but it is my work as a philosopher. The roots of this evil which has stolen your face are within you yourself, the monster has come from your own innards – and whence will appear many other monsters, even worse than this one, as long as you will hesitate to admit that it is caused by your own illness and diseases, and as long as you will delay to attack this internal roots of evil!

When will we finally understand that Islam is not the heir of German Nazism only, that it was its precursor, that the extermination of the Jews in Europe was preceded by the bestial genocide of Armenians and Greeks in Turkey, that the barbarism previously rooted in this religion led to the murder of tens of millions of people and the enslavement of many nations, that in Islam cruelty is an imperative and terror is a dogma. The Palestinians have been assigned the role of the vanguard of Islam, which must regain the honour of conquering the world.

Bassem Eid wrote in May 2023:

What is happening in the Middle East right now is very simple. The theocratic regime of the Ayatollahs in Iran, not content with quashing women’s dignity and hanging youthful protesters at home, seeks to impose its apocalyptic medieval vision upon the whole region. Just as the terrorist factions that claim Palestinian leadership were used as enthusiastic pawns in the fascist-style wars of aggrandisement waged by the pan-Arab regime of Gamal Abdul Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’ath totalitarianism of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, PIJ and Hamas are now attempting to pull the Palestinian people into Iran’s bloodthirsty schemes. I have a better idea. Let’s give our families and our children peace and prosperity, not projectiles and pain. Let’s have an agreement and understanding with Israel, instead of endless fighting and religious tyranny under Iran.

This desperate and naïve cry of a Palestinian is of no interest to Western journalists whose conscience dictates their saving the power of Palestinian Nazis over the Palestinians. Iran has been fighting for a “free Palestine” since 1979 only, before their Islamic Revolution others have done so. This Palestinian activist fighting for the rights of Palestinians reminds us in the same article that he was born in Jerusalem, from which his family was forcibly resettled not by Israelis, but by Jordanians. But the persecution of Palestinians by Palestinians and other Arabs doesn’t matter to the world because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Bassem Eid repeatedly says that the Palestinian leadership is responsible for the deaths of young Palestinians, for brainwashing them, for encouraging attacks, for praising death, and for destroying anyone who even mentions peaceful coexistence.

The Arab Spring democratically brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power in Egypt, and the West was outraged when an Egyptian general stripped them of power. Egypt’s president-general would like to change the way Islam is taught in Egypt. This provokes not only strong opposition from religious institutions, but also unfriendly murmurs from the West. It seems that we have serious problems with answering the question of who the enemy is.

The West helped overthrow the Shah in Iran, armed the Afghan mujahideen; this century it overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and helped overthrow Yemeni President Saleh.

Iraqi-Lebanese dissident Hussain Abdul-Hussain wonders why this fight against terror has consistently been counterproductive. Why is it that after every victory comes the defeat and rise of the most radical forces of Islam? He went from being a radical fighter for the Palestinian cause to an Arab in solidarity with Israel, “discovering America” when the United States overthrew Saddam Hussein, whom he hated. Years later, he wrote:

Today, 10 years later, almost everyone regrets the toppling of bloody tyrants like Saddam, Libya’s Qadhafi and Yemen’s Saleh. Arabs are just not cut out for democracy. Once central authority crumbles, militias mushroom and make it even harder to build anything democratic. Then Iran’s tyrannical regime sponsors these militias to project regional influence, and instead of countries changing from autocracy to democracy, they become Medieval in the image of Islamist Iran.

In Iraq, U.S. weapons, worth billions of dollars, which were given to the Iraqi army, fell into the hands of ISIS, huge stockpiles of weapons that were in Gaddafi’s hands ended up in the hands of African Islamists, in Afghanistan American weapons ended up in the hands of the Taliban. Earlier in Iran, immediately after Islamists gained power, American hostages were taken, and the slogan of the Islamic revolution was then and is now: “Death to America, death to Israel.” But the West is wary of supporting Iranian protesters, African Christians, Muslim dissidents and ex-Muslims. It fights some unspecified terrorism and supports the "Palestinian people", which for the Western left is the new proletariat.

As our Polish expert, Konstanty Gebert, wrote in response to my review of his book, “I wrote a history of Israel, not of the Arab world, so I’m interested in possible fascists in Israel, not in the Arab states.”

Six years ago, the son of one of Hamas’s founders appeared before the UN Human Rights Council at the invitation of UN Watch. His voice clearly frightened the peace-loving nations’ representatives present, but it made no impression on the journalists of the world’s mainstream media. 

A new interview with the so-called “son of Hamas”, Mosab Hassan Yousef, has just been published on October 20, in which he says that “Israel must put an end to Hamas.” Where? At Fox News, of course, because liberal journalists can’t afford such symmetry.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, is a co-founder and one of Hamas’s leaders, knows what he is talking about when he presents Hamas’s goals and tactics.

Yousef says that Israel must crack down on “the most brutal terrorist organisation operating today.”

When Arafat was given power over the Palestinians, he made no secret of his intention to make the “State of Palestine” a terrorist base to fight the Jews. The more radical Hamas decided that he was doing it too slowly and too gently, that Islam had to win more quickly.

Israeli Arab Yoseph Haddad, an IDF soldier who now fights anti-Israel propaganda, was invited by the Israeli television station I24. When I open the link, the screen is black, I find out that the video has been restricted, that it contains graphic scenes, and that the content is potentially controversial. They ask me if I want to continue. I want to. Haddad talks about the workings of the media during the war, about the flood of lies, about the absurd reversal of reality and the accusation of Israeli soldiers of beheading babies, about how these lies are met with insufficient responses. There are no graphic scenes here, nor anything controversial, unless the statement that the majority of Israeli Arabs prefer to live under Israeli rule rather than under Hamas or Abbas is controversial to somebody. Attaching such reservations to this interview says a lot about the state of media corporations.

Many Israelis have been saved by their non-Jewish fellow citizens from death, maiming, or kidnapping by Hamas thugs.

Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin from the Israeli town of Rahat, risked his life on October 7 to save about 30 people in his minibus. Of course, today he is receiving death threats, which are believed to have come from other Arab citizens of Israel.

We see the terror, we don’t want to see its sources, we sympathise, but not with the Palestinians betrayed by the Arabs and their own leaders, but rather with those who make heroic efforts to kill Jews and who are hindered in these efforts by the perfidious Israelis. We don’t want to be Islamophobes, so we refuse to hear the voices of desperate Muslims, those who don’t want to be radicalised, who don’t want to kill, who don’t want to fight for peace to the last Jew, and who don’t want to die for Allah.

Hundreds of condemnations of Hamas can be found on Arab social media. Arabs write that Hamas’s actions are contrary to Islam, morality, and humanity.

Many ex-Muslims who do not intend to rationalise their knowledge of their upbringing in Islam flatly refuse to agree with the statement that these actions are contrary to Islam. They claim that they do not contradict the Qur’an, nor its interpretation by religious institutions, nor what they were taught at home, in the mosque, and at school. Both sides are somewhat right, and in many liberal Muslim homes, children are protected from the most destructive religious teachings. Hence such beautiful Muslim figures as Zakaria Fellah, an Algerian-born Muslim who studied in Switzerland and was a UN employee for many years. A few years ago he resigned as spokesman for the UN mission in Côte d’Ivoire due to the dramatic extent of corruption in the UN peacekeeping force. In the article, which begins by recalling the song “Losing My Religion” (which was obviously about Christianity), which was popular in the West in the 1990s, the author wrote that his Muslim faith was getting weaker. The reasons are obvious, every day the worst news comes from the Islamic world.

“New movements, organisations, militias, networks. New monsters…same methods: Terror and gruesome violence against anyone slightly different: Muslims and non-Muslims are the easy prey for fanatics who dare say their crimes are committed in my name!

Islamic supremacists, Islamo-fascists, that’s what they are. The new Barbarians on the march against human civilisation and progress in the name of a Jihad they embarked on…without consulting with me.
A new form of totalitarianism claiming legitimacy from the early days of the new religion, the “Final Revelation.

One goal. And it’s a chilling one: The planet should submit or else. The word Islam after all, is synonymous with submission…Death to diversity, Death to science and technology, Death to human rights, Women’s rights, Dogs’ rights, No to Art! No to Music, No to Sex! No to Beauty! NO to pleasures! Haram, haram, haram…almost every human activity is HARAM. And Death to everybody who’s NOT them!

Born in Britain to a Pakistani family, British doctor Qanta Ahmed calls on Muslim leaders to condemn Hamas. In a speech at the Independent Women’s Forum posted on Twitter, she said:

We are absolutely horrified at the slaying of Israelis and Jews in their own homes in an act of lethal genocide, that is what Hamas espouses, is lethal antisemitism.

The story of the beautifully believing Muslims would take many pages, but in the “State of Palestine” (both in Hamas-ruled Gaza and in the Palestinian Liberation Organisation-ruled Palestinian Authority), protecting one’s own children from the effects of a barbaric religion borders on the impossible. Don’t count on finding information about it in your media. Rather, you will hear Greta Thunberg’s appeal for solidarity with Palestine.

Translated from the Polish by Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson.