Gaza is a smoking ruin today because Islamists still think they’re invincible
More than 20 years ago, the Mackenzie Institute newsletter identified a bizarre and deadly defect in then-Palestinian leader and terrorist Yasser Arafat: “an impulsive urge for trying to take the pot with a pair of fours.” But it’s not just him. It’s on display today from Gaza to Toronto, and we need to stand up to it.
Admittedly Canadian pro-Hamas protesters could be forgiven for thinking they’re strong. They appear to have the police on their side, and much of the political class including that jangling dunce Jagmeet Singh. But I think it’s as bad a misread of the situation on the ground as Arafat’s belief he was about to destroy Israel.
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Canadians generally do not support genocidal terror or racial and religious hate, and these jackals will take down the craven or wicked politicians now grovelling before them. But they will do a lot of harm along the way, including to public trust in our institutions. So what’s behind this chronic overplaying of their hand?
Wikipedia offers the following mealy-mouthed rubbish on Arafat: “Palestinians generally view him as a martyr who symbolized the national aspirations of his people, while many Israelis regarded him as a terrorist. Palestinian rivals, including Islamists and several PLO radicals, frequently denounced him as corrupt or too submissive in his concessions to the Israeli government.”
How is Arafat a “martyr?” He died in bed, unlike many he got killed on both sides. As for “regarded him as a terrorist” he made no secret of it. OK, he was corrupt. But “submissive in his concessions?” There’s that pair of fours again.
What do they think he should have done? Destroyed Israel through a pair of intifadas? He tried and brought disaster on his own people. As the Mackenzie takedown added, “Unfortunately the poker games he deals himself into employ human lives as chips.” And it’s not just him. Gaza is a smoking ruin today because Islamists still think they’re invincible despite continually attacking Israel and getting clobbered.
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Compare where the Palestinians are on any measure of well-being today with where they’d be if they’d made peace with Israel at any point. As they easily could have.
Instead, for instance, after Israeli’s stunning 1967 “Seven Days’ War” victory, Arab tyrants issued their famous “Three Noes” (or “Three Noes of Khartoum”): “No peace with Israel/ No negotiations with Israel/ No recognition of Israel.” It was such an odd misread of the situation as to prompt acid-tongued Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban’s “This is the first war in history which has ended with the victors suing for peace, and the vanquished calling for unconditional surrender.” But a tragically typical one.
At some point, we have to ask what drives Islamists chronically and catastrophically to go all-in with a pair of fours. And I have a suggestion. On the solid historical rule that ideas have consequences, the crucial thing about Islamists is Islamism. They are motivated by what they consider the only proper reading of the Qur’an, to the point of killing anyone who disputes it.
What is that reading? Well, the original 1988 Hamas Charter included in Section 7: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘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.’ (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).”
Now you laugh. But this hadith is attested to by Sunni Islam’s two most authoritative compilers of Muhammad’s sayings. So it doesn’t matter whether you find it absurd, offensive or both. Or rather, it matters enormously, because unless you are insane in a way that does not diminish culpability, you also find Hamas to be both. And when people say things you disagree with and do things you disagree with, it’s because they think things you disagree with. Hitler, too, seemed comic-opera in his grotesque posturing, overblown rhetoric and preposterous manifesto until he launched World War II and the Holocaust.
For Hamas, like Arafat, the key is their unshakable conviction that if they hate Jews enough Allah will grant them rapid decisive victory over their enemies and a bevy of sex slaves to boot. And BTW their fundamentalism includes killing homosexuals, for any Queers for Palestine or Drag Show for Palestine thinking of attempting a performance in Gaza or the West Bank.
So they really mean it. Now what do we do?
Well, for starters don’t appease them. It feeds their grandiose delusions of imminent destiny and encourages aggression. Instead take their ideas seriously, and laugh in their faces.
National Post
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