A Hamas poster glorifying the martyr who drowns the Zionists in blood (central motif of the cover art for Raphael Israeli’s seminal “Islamikaze”)
From my essay ,“Understanding Hamas’ Mainstream, Genocidal Islamic Jew-Hatred,” published yesterday (7/24/14) at PJ Media:
Addressing the UNHRC January 31, 1989, less than 6-months after the Hamas covenant was made public, Littman warned that the document was,
a blatant blueprint for genocide, undoubtedly inspired by its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. I have with me a copy of the Arabic text and an English translation. Its aims are clearly defined in article 8, under the title, “Slogan”: “Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution; Jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of wishes.” Article 13 declares: “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.” And article 28 does not beat about the bush: “Israel, Judaism, and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people: ‘May the cowards never sleep.’”
Twenty-five years ago, Littman observed then, as now, how Hamas was “operating mainly in Gaza—but also in the West Bank—in collaboration with PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] groups.” David Littman concluded by excoriating alleged “peacemakers,” whose delusions about Hamas’ openly professed ideology are still wreaking calamitous consequences, repeated by their equally witless policymaking successors today.
These realities cannot be brushed aside simply because they are embarrassing, but should rather serve as a serious warning to the gullible for whom an appeasing, misguiding, “peace in our time,” will-o’-the-wisp remains a constant obsession.
The essay places Hamas’ ugly ideology in its mainstream Islamic context:
Unfortunately, Hamas’ views on the jihad against Israel, and Islamic Jew-hatred, are entirely concordant with those of the most authoritative religious educational institution within Sunni Islam-Al Azhar University, in Cairo, Egypt. Consider two complementary fatwas, one written January 5, 1956, by then grand mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Hasan Ma’moun, and another January 9, 1956, signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s Vatican—and the major representatives of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence. These rulings elaborated the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine—modern Jordan, Israel, and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza—having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma (community), “fay territory”—booty or spoils—to be governed eternally by Islamic law.
Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim territory. [As] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad . . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim… Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Although free of eschatological references, the January 1956 Al Azhar fatwas’ language and arguments—pronounced from Sunni Islam’s most esteemed religious teaching institution—are otherwise indistinguishable from those employed just over three decades later by Hamas (in its 1988 covenant), revealing the same conjoined motivations of jihad, and conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred. Furthermore, espousing these ugly Islamic religious teachings at Al-Azhar has continued unabated over the intervening six nearly decades, till now. Al-Azhar’s two most recent spiritual leaders, Grand Imam Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi (who held that position from 1996-2010), and his successor, current Grand Imam, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, have reinforced this ignoble tradition of promoting jihadism and Islamic Jew-hatred directed at Israel, and Jews, generally.
Returning to David Littman’s tireless efforts, since January 1989 to cajole the moral cretins at the UN Human Rights Commission into condemning Hamas’ “sacralized” ideology of genocidal Islamic Jew-hatred, the essay concludes with these observations:
…Almost 12-years ago, David Littman made this plaintive warning:
It will be hard enough to strive for the creation of stable, democratic states in the Middle East even without widespread conspiracy theories and the Hamas genocidal charter – a charter denounced neither by Muslim spiritual and political leaders nor by the United Nations…if Hamas refuses to scrap its genocidal charter and renounce the ideology of jihad-war – there can be no possibility of serious progress toward a Middle East peace, with two states coexisting side by side.
Littman’s nearly quarter century of appeals and admonitions having gone entirely unheeded, the global community must now grapple with the bloodthirsty, Jew-annihilationist aspirations of an unreformed Hamas. Israel’s continuing Operation Protective Edge is an eminently just and reasonable response to the unconscionable menace posed by a Hamas the rest of the world, ignores, appeases, or abets.
Please read the entire essay.
