HAMAS ADDRESSES THE JEWISH QUESTION

      To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.

      —George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

      NAZI ANTISEMITISM IN ARAB DRESS

      The prewar German National Socialist Party made itself notorious, as we all know, for promoting the kind of antisemitism with which this book will be mainly concerned: the kind that sees a Jewish conspiracy at the root of every non-Jewish reverse and holds that the inimical influence of the Jews, or Zionism, can only be countered by getting rid of them, or it, altogether.

      It is common to hear it said today that that kind of antisemitism died as a serious political force with the final defeat of Nazism in 1945 and nowadays survives in the Western world only among tiny neofascist groups with neither the numerical strength nor the political influence to revive it.

      Despite the undeniable frequency and savagery of Islamist assaults on individual Jews and on Jewish institutions and property, one commonly also hears it said that there is in the Islamic world no equivalent to Western antisemitism, of this or any other kind. In the same vein, it is widely assumed in the more bien-pensant liberal and left-leaning sections of the media that Muslim opposition to Jews, far from being antisemitic, is wholly political in nature, stemming purely from resentment against the threat to Muslim interests posed by the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel.

      I shall be arguing at length in this book that both these claims are false. Argument starved of concrete instances, however, soon becomes vapid and overformal. It seems appropriate to begin, therefore, with two chapters offering instances of both the survival and the influence today of exactly the kind of antisemitism popularized by the Nazis. The present chapter will contrast the overt antisemitism of an Islamist organization with the covert but not dissimilar implications of a Eurobarometer poll. Chapter 2 will examine an American academic debate ostensibly concerned with the “scholarly” issue of the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

      Hamas, the Islamist¹ organization that at present controls Gaza, is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Society of Muslim Brothers, Jama’at al-ikhwan al-muslimin), an organization founded in 1928 in Egypt by the charismatic preacher Hassan al-Banna. A leading scholar of Islamic antisemitism has this to say of the latter: “The significance of this organization goes far beyond Egypt. For today’s global Islamist movement the Muslim Brothers are what the Bolsheviks were for the Communist movement of the 1920s: the ideological reference point and organizational core which decisively inspired all the subsequent tendencies and continues to do so to this day.”²

      Hamas currently enjoys support in the West both among elements of the Muslim community and in those parts of the left whose dislike of the United States and Israel allows their sympathizers to overlook the utter moral and intellectual incompatibility of leading elements of Hamas’s outlook with values they themselves profess in other contexts. Those elements include religious fanaticism, support of suicide bombing (including the use of children as suicide bombers), rabid misogyny, hatred of gays, and in general, the contempt of Hamas and similar Islamist organizations for everything in which the Western left has traditionally believed, including human rights, democracy, and socialism. Blatant political opportunism of this kind is widely considered to extend at time of writing to the current leadership of the British Labour Party. “In 2009, when Jeremy Corbyn [recently the leader of the Labour Party in parliamentary opposition—BH] invited ‘friends’ from Hezbollah and Hamas to speak in Parliament, he said of Hamas: ‘The idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people, and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.’”³

      In addition to its other unsavory characteristics, Hamas has traditionally advertised its commitment to a type of antisemitism differing in no significant respect from that espoused by the Nazis. Article 22 of the movement’s 1988 charter, or covenant, contains the following passage:

      For a long time, the enemies [the Jews] have been planning, skilfully [sic] and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.

      You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.⁴

      The 1988 Hamas covenant makes a good starting