I was raised to curse Israel and pray for the destruction of Jews, writes AYAAN HIRSI ALI... That's why I know all too well Hamas is another ISIS - whatever useful idiots in the West say
All across the West, there is no shortage of people blaming the horrors in Israel on Israel itself — and openly supporting the perpetrators.
The head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which monitors hate crimes committed against British Jews, has said: 'Anti-Semites are getting excited by the sight of dead Jews... Hamas murdering Israeli civilians has exhilarated them... We've had reports of people driving past synagogues shouting 'Kill the Jews'.'
Anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are currently three times higher than they were this time last year, the charity adds.
'Free Palestine' graffiti has been scrawled on a railway bridge in Golders Green, a Jewish area of north London, while in Oxford Street, one young woman — who may well have been radicalised in England — was filmed ripping down posters that pleaded for the safe return of the babies taken hostage by Hamas. 'Free Palestine, f*** you!' she screamed at an onlooker who dared to remonstrate with her.
On Thursday night in Paris, police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of people at a pro-Palestine rally, in which protesters chanted 'Israel murderer [sic]' and 'End the siege of Gaza.'
Outside the Sydney Opera House, about 1,000 protesters lit flares and waved Palestinian flags — and some were filmed chanting: 'Gas the Jews.'
In the U.S., meanwhile, 31 student groups at Harvard signed an open letter claiming that the 'Israeli regime' was 'entirely responsible for all unfolding violence', while California's Stanford University displayed a banner declaring that Palestine would be made free 'by any means necessary' — a sinister slogan that tacitly justifies Hamas's slaughter of children in pursuit of its aims.
Not to be outdone, the Chicago 'chapter' of the Black Lives Matter movement posted an image of a paraglider alongside the slogan 'I stand with Palestine'. The reference, of course, was to Hamas paragliders who descended on Israel's Supernova music festival last Saturday to rape and butcher at least 260 young people.
In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement's noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a 'Jew', not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a 'Jew' was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this 'slur'.
As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful 'two-state solution': we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.
When I was 16, my school's teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran's lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word.
When the fatwa was issued against the British writer Salman Rushdie in 1989, a small crowd gathered in a Nairobi car park to burn a copy of his novel The Satanic Verses.
Sister Aziza urged us to join in the condemnations of Rushdie and I am ashamed to say I took part in the book-burning. I was certain Rushdie should be killed, but the scene nevertheless made me uncomfortable.
That seed of doubt grew over the next few years as I questioned why, if Allah was so just, women were treated as mere chattels in some Muslim families.
Over time, my questions turned into open rebellion against the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam and, ultimately, my family.
My father sent me to relatives in Germany in 1992 so I could go from there to Canada to join the distant cousin he had married me off to. I ran away from that marriage and travelled to the Netherlands where I sought asylum.
Eventually, I became a member of the Dutch parliament, and later settled in America.
I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism's pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.
The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should 'nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred' of Jews. His organisation has done just that — and the despicable sentiment is the underlying context to Hamas's most recent attacks.
The truth, however, is that Hamas is no more a friend of the Palestinians than it is a friend of Israel.
Those who see the conflict as a simple territorial dispute between a colonial state and a dispossessed minority fail to recognise Hamas for what it really is: a gang of genocidal Islamist thugs backed by a theocratic, anti-Semitic regime in Iran.
Useful idiots on the far-Left in Western countries, who blindly support Hamas because they see it as a freedom-fighting group, harm the very people they claim to defend.
They say they want peace —and perhaps many of them do. But real peace talks based on the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries have made painstaking but undeniable progress despite the efforts of Hamas.
Until Hamas's recent attacks, Saudi Arabia and Israel had looked set to normalise relations. This murderous incursion was an attempt to derail such talks — and thus ruin any chance of lasting peace.
Ordinary Palestinians want to build a prosperous, functioning society. Hamas, in its obsession with annihilating Israel, doesn't care about that. It wishes only to bring about a genocidal Islamist dystopia.
It is Hamas, after all, that holds Palestinians hostage in Gaza, setting up military installations in — and launching rockets from — civilian areas in the full knowledge that counterstrikes will kill innocent people.
It is Hamas that impoverishes Palestinians by stealing humanitarian aid to fund its terror. This is what 'by any means necessary' truly signifies: supreme callousness towards Palestinian life.
If you genuinely want to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians, or more generally between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East, then Hamas should be your enemy.
And even if — like many in the West, as we can now see — you don't care at all about Israeli or Jewish lives, even if you care only about the lives of Palestinians, Hamas is still your enemy. After all, Hamas ruthlessly persecutes any Palestinians who disagree with it: a 2022 U.S. State Department report found that, among other abuses, Hamas detained and assaulted critical journalists.
It is especially hostile to public figures associated with its rival Fatah, the Palestinian party voted out of office in Gaza in 2006, but which still runs the West Bank.
Hamas harasses its own dissidents, and has invaded the home of at least one young critical activist, telling his parents to keep their son under control — or else.
As a Dutch MP in 2004 and 2005, I travelled to the West Bank and met Palestinians.
In public, they spouted all the usual lines about Israel being their 'oppressor'. But once the cameras were switched off, they spoke more truthfully.
They complained bitterly about their treatment by Hamas and other radical groups, and told me how money meant to feed the people was being taken to fund those organisations' activities and their leaders' luxurious lifestyles. Arabs and Palestinians alike told me how fed up they were with conflict, and how ready they were for peace.
Hamas, like other Islamist groups, has done its best over the course of decades to stomp all over those wishes.
And it has been successful. The shocking rise in anti-Semitism in the West owes much to the entrenched Islamist networks that have spent years stirring up this ancient hatred.
Europe must now wake up to these fifth columnists who shamelessly celebrate violence and bigotry, promoting hatred of the Jewish minority in Europe.
The West must also wake up to the moral corruption of its own Hamas supporters, from Left-wing university students to flag-waving street thugs.
Meanwhile, elite human-rights organisations need to do far more to name terrorism when they see it.
It is horrifying to see Amnesty International claiming that one of the 'root causes' of the crisis is 'Israel's system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians'.
Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, should do more than merely equivocating in its insistence that no injustice can justify another.
This is not to argue that Israel should be immune from criticism. My point is that much of the criticism is at best misguided and at worst thinly veiled anti-Semitism.
Hamas, like Lebanon's Hezbollah, Isis in Syria and Iraq, Nigeria's Boko Haram, Somalia's Al-Shabaab and several other groups, are fighting not for the liberty and prosperity of Muslims but, ultimately, for the annihilation of Israel and the imposition of an Islamic state.
If Palestinians and other Muslims have to suffer for that aim, then so be it.
Well-meaning celebrities and broadcasters who, out of wilful ignorance and good intentions, hesitate to condemn Hamas as terrorists need to recognise this truth.
These are dark times for Israel and for the world, but there are some reasons to be hopeful.
This week's strong statement by America, Britain, France, Italy and Germany condemning Hamas while recognising the 'legitimate aspirations' of the Palestinians is a good sign.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer's condemnation of Hamas is particularly welcome, given that, until recently, his party was led by a man who called these butchers his 'friends'.
And if Israel and the Arab states do not allow their worst instincts to rule them, talks may continue — and might just secure peace in the longer term.
Hamas is another Isis. They are the enemies of Israel; they are the enemies of all Jews; they are the enemies of Palestinians; they are the enemies of peace and freedom. They are the enemies of Western civilisation itself.
It is about time they were recognised as such.
To achieve a two-state solution — with free and prosperous Palestinians and a safe Israel — the first, fundamental step is for people to stop chanting slogans in support of terrorists and murderers, and for everyone to cry in unison: 'Down with Hamas!'
Remember two years ago when everyone was arguing about whether the terrorist assault and takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban was Trump's fault or Biden's fault? Today, people are scolding us not to call the same thing terrorism. It's "liberation" and "decolonization."
Remember when kids rushed to support ISIS the instant they rose, and people were appalled and argued over how could it could be possible to support a terrorist state that seized illegitimate power? Online radicalization was blamed, and many didn't want to believe that indoctrination had primed it well in advance. Now, if your Gender and Postcolonial Studies haven't activated you to support a terrorist state that has seized illegitimate power in the region, you're a bigot.
Remember when we cheered on the Iranians for finally fighting back against the regime of terror that hung over them, hoping for them to finally win the war against the regime? Now, Israel has to simply take whatever assaults of terrorism are dealt at them; it is, as Douglas Murray said, is the only country which is not allowed to win a war.
How morally confused do you have to be, after all this, to side with the terrorists?
Hamas is to Palestine as ISIS is to Syria and the Taliban is to Afghanistan.
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah 's Apostle said, "I have been ordered to fight with the people till they say, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' and whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah,' his life and property will be saved by me except for Islamic law, and his accounts will be with Allah, (either to punish him or to forgive him.)"
Narrated Anas bin Malik:
Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) said, "I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.' And if they say so, pray like our prayers, face our Qibla and slaughter as we slaughter, then their blood and property will be sacred to us and we will not interfere with them except legally and their reckoning will be with Allah."
Narrated Maimun bin Siyah that he asked Anas bin Malik, "O Abu Hamza! What makes the life and property of a person sacred?" He replied, "Whoever says, 'None has the right to be worshipped but Allah', faces our Qibla during the prayers, prays like us and eats our slaughtered animal, then he is a Muslim, and has got the same rights and obligations as other Muslims have."
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:
The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
It has successfully weaponized intersectional shibboleths to trick useful idiots into thinking that the supremacist is the oppressed victim.
