Israel allows the Muslim world to release their inner antisemite
Israel is not only a convenient distraction for Muslim populations living under controlling and often violent regimes it is also a chance to demonstrate antisemitism.
One Israeli politician summed up the situation after the October 7th massacres in Israel, carried out by Hamas terrorists by saying “Never again happened again”. This was the largest wholesale murder of innocent Jews since the holocaust. What drove it? A dedication to wiping out every jew “from the river to the sea” - so Palestine can be free and presumably become another authoritarian Islamic state. Imagine doing this to your kids:
So it isn’t surprising that well over a thousand Israeli men, women children and babies were butchered by Islamic militants that believed (in the Hamas charter) that:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
There is of course the other side of this narrative. The palestinian narrative. Which I won’t go into now as it is as long and complicated as Israel’s version of events. I am writing today about the now. We still have in Gaza around 240 hostages. Some of them are babies. BABIES. These are men who would happily behead babies for their militant form of Islam.
Also don’t be fooled into thinking that this kind of hatred of Jews is confined to just Hamas fighters. This one terrorist calls his parents to brag about killing Jews, and they are proud of their son.
I am not aiming to write Islamaphobic content here though, simply to present facts. There is genuine RAGE against Jews being channelled directly at Israel from the Muslim world. Yes, some of it is justified because of the horrors of war, especially such an acute asymmetrical battle with high civilian casualties.
For Israel this isn’t about revenge, this is about a very famous Israeli and Jewish saying.
NEVER AGAIN
The entire strength of the Israeli war machine - which is vast - will be focused on seeking out and destroying every last Hamas leader and every last Hamas terrorist. We cannot sit back in the west and say “well, Israel should show restraint” against such dangerous antisemitism. The worst thing is there is no getting rid of it. It’s in the holy book of Islam - the Quran.
Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him — except for the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews.
That isn’t to say all Muslims are antisemitic. Of course they’re not. It also isn’t to say the Palestinian cause is antisemitic as they have genuine grievances. It is to highlight that just like in Christianity and Judaism, there are problematic archaic texts. We can’t control or change these days what holy books say. Religions rarely change their own texts.
What we can control is how we engage with the Jewish world. These are people who have known great suffering and are suffering now after an unimaginable terrorist attack. What Israel must do is refuse to give any ground to antisemitism. To do so would be inviting even more attacks. Jews have been throughout Christian and Muslim history both a subject of ridicule and fear. Now that Israel is capable of defending and removing threats to Jews at least nobody is ridiculing them at this moment.
So we have to understand that the eradication of Hamas and the capture (or likely assassination) of all Hamas leaders linked to October 7th is a minimum goal. Israel will treat Hamas the same as they treated Nazis after World War 2. There is no stopping this. There will be no peace. There will be no ceasefire. Only war, perhaps even the war of Judgment Day.
That would at least please all the religious Muslims, Christians and Jews. It will not of course bring back to life the murdered Jews or civilians in Gaza killed in the military response to October 7. This will continue to fuel an already out-of-control antisemitism throughout the Middle East and beyond.
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