Hamas’s Karma

Karma Nabulsi has a lively imagination.

While this imagination is most haunted by a crude, ugly caricature of Israelis – who she has literally accused (in a CiF entry from 2006) of blowing Palestinian schoolchildren to bits while they play – it is also informed by a romanticized and sanitized vision of Palestinian “resistance“.

Nabulsi believes that current Palestinian divisions are “not political” but, merely, “geographic”.

Indeed, Karma Nabulsis latest plea for Palestinian elections seeks to include not only the several million living in Gaza and the West Bank, but the millions more living elsewhere in the Arab world. (The single demand that can unite the Palestinian people, CiF, March 29).

If this is indeed the case,  if the estimated 9 million Palestinians (included in Nabulsi’s expansive definition of this “community”), are an ideologically homogeneous bunch, then recent history would suggest that the likely results of such an election would likely move this greater Palestinian Moshav in a decidedly more illiberal direction – a scenario which is unlikely to trouble the former PLO representative and Oxford academic.

Of course, the reactionary forces which have previously served to sooth the Palestinian political soul is the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas).

In the January 25, 2006, not long after Israel withdrew every last remaining Jew from Gaza, Palestinians held parliamentary elections and, in a fair and free election which garnered a 77.7% voter turnout, a plurality of Palestinians voted for Hamas, the Iranian backed terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

After a brief period of a Hamas-Fatah unity government, Hamas, between June 7 -15 2007, launched a bloody purge of Fatah officials, killing scores of political opponents, and which resulted in Hamas’ complete control of Gaza.

Since 1989 Hamas has carried out over 100 terrorist attacks, killing over 500, and has launched over 12,000 rockets and mortars into Israel since 2001.

The Hamas Charter includes:

  • Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).
  • “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. “
  • “There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”
  • “After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”

One of the most ominous aspects of the Charter however, is this Hadith:

Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

The implication is that Allah promised that the Jews will be murdered, and Hamas “aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.”

While anyone with a grasp of the history of anti-Semitism shouldn’t be surprised by the continued existence of movements who hate Jews and openly seek their destruction, the tendency of supposed progressive voices to legitimize, excuse and sanitize such naked malice towards such a historically persecuted religious minority is a more recent and uniquely dangerous political dynamic – one which this blog is dedicated to exposing.

Karma Nabulsi, much like the publication which grants her license, seems to possess an insatiable desire to glorify even the most explicitly reactionary and malicious Palestinian liberation movements and, in so doing, provides Hamas with their only source of true strength – soft power not deriving from their military might, or even the zealotry of the group’s adherents, but rather the moral legitimacy provided to them by a Western world increasingly rendered mute in the face of pure political malevolence.

This profound moral abdication is the gift to Hamas which the likes of Karma Nabulsi will likely continue to exploit.

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