That footage of Yahya Sinwar’s last, gasping breaths before he was justly shuffled off this mortal coil was extraordinary. Here we had the death agony of a fascist broadcast to the world. Crooked and hunched in a chair coated in dust, in a building bombed almost to nothing, he stared forlornly at his final foe: an Israeli drone. He used his one working arm – the other withered by injury – to toss a stick in the drone’s direction. It was a suitably primitive gesture from the leader of a gang of medieval militants who made the grave error of starting a war with the Jewish State. The stick did nothing, of course. Moments later, their drone having confirmed the presence of a terrorist, the IDF fired a tank shell into the ruins and the architect of the bloodiest pogrom since the Nazis was dead.
Not since the execution of Benito Mussolini by the Italian Resistance had the world been granted such a battle-side view of the death of a fascist. We have all seen the photograph of Mussolini hanging by his feet in Milan in 1945 following his summary execution by partisans and the pelting of his body with rotten vegetables by crowds of righteous, free Italians. Now we have seen the execution of the man who organised the largest slaughter of Jews in 80 years. It was less chaotic – the IDF troops who happened upon Sinwar’s hideout observed his body but did not desecrate it – but no less momentous. A little over a year since Hamas’s pogrom, justice had been served against the plotter of that racist outrage. The young Jews of the IDF had toppled the most notorious Jew-killer of our age.
Yet there was a tint of tragedy to the events of last week. Not in the death of Sinwar – no one should mourn a pogromist. But in that drone footage we also glimpsed the consequences of Sinwar’s murderous vanity. All around him we saw the wages of his futile war against the Jews. We saw the devastation of a patch of land, and of a people, that Sinwar clearly viewed as expendable entities, as mere chess pieces in his game of hate against the Jewish nation. It was brutally confirmed: courtesy of the hijacking of the Palestinian issue by the Islamist demagogues of Hamas, the very idea of Palestine is now as pulverised as that building Sinwar perished in.
The response of the woke West to the death of Sinwar has been mad, even by their standards. In the grimmest nooks of online Israelophobia, there is actual mourning. Even mainstream voices are saying Israel lied and Sinwar wasn’t in fact scurried in a tunnel underground but was on the frontline, fighting with his men. Shorter version: hero. Others say it is a grave folly on Israel’s part to think it can crush a ‘national liberation movement’ by bumping off its leaders. Honestly, the speed with which Western leftists went from saying ‘The only good fascist is a dead fascist’ to saying ‘We can’t just kill everyone in Hamas’ has been mindblowing. From puffed-up anti-fascists who fancied themselves the heirs to the International Brigades to snivelling weepers at the coffins of the fallen fascists of Hamas – it would be funny if it were not so tragic.
The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?
As I argue in my book, After the Pogrom, Hamas is ‘as far from an anti-colonial movement as it is possible to get’. Where past national liberation movements aspired, at least, to represent ‘the people’, Hamas conceives of itself as a narrow instrument of God. Where those old movements dreamed of creating a nation, Hamas dreams of subjecting a nation to God’s will – we will ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, it promises (my italics). It wants to impose on Palestine the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ – the sovereignty of the edicts of Sharia with their blind intolerance of manmade law, women’s rights and democracy itself.
The current war is a direct consequence of the Islamist delusions of the hysterics of Hamas. In their eyes, Gaza is not a terrestrial plane that ought to enjoy self-governance – it’s another front in the cosmic showdown between the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ and the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’. And the people of Gaza are not individuals deserving of life and respect – they’re mere martyrs-in-the-making, fleshy fodder for Hamas’s fanatical war on the Jews. In the words of Article 8 of the Hamas Covenant, ‘death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes’. Sinwar himself updated this deathly creed following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel when he said dead Gazans are ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get ‘the Israelis right where we want them’.
Hamas is not a liberation movement – it’s a death cult. This is the central difference between the old armies of national liberation and Hamas’s army of God: where the former believed their people had a right to live freely, the latter thinks their people should embrace death happily. Statehood is no longer the ‘loftiest’ of goals – death is. Gazans are promised not democracy, but martyrdom; not independence, but oblivion. In declaring a religious war on Israel, in slaughtering 1,200 Jews on 7 October, Hamas brought war to Gaza and reduced an aspiring nation to a theatre of holy warfare, and its people to bit-part players in the Hamas psychosis, underlings of fundamentalism, whose highest duty is to die.
Hamas is not alone in subjugating Palestine to its own lethal narcissism. Its Islamist hijacking of the Palestine issue is more than matched by the woke hijacking of it by the lost elites of the West. They, too, bend Palestine to their vain agendas. Palestine has become the omnicause of our cultural establishments. It’s the issue through which they express their self-absorbed angst with the West itself, with modernity, with this thing we call ‘civilisation’. On our campuses, in our streets, in the media world and art world, ‘Palestine’ has become a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged. Like Hamas, these ostentatious pitiers of the Palestinians turn Palestine from a real place with real people into an abstract moral landscape in which what really matters is my hang-ups, not their aspirations.
This is the fate of the Palestinians, then: physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas and moral fodder for the virtue-signalling of the West’s elites. Playthings of both the Islamist theocracy and the cultural aristocracy. And thus do those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians dehumanise them far more than Israel does, turning them into a stage army for fundamentalism, whether of the Islamist variety or the woke variety. It is hard to see where the Palestinians go from here. The dream of a Palestinian state – or even a two-state solution – has been broken on the wheel of nihilism.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Yet there was a tint of tragedy to the events of last week. Not in the death of Sinwar – no one should mourn a pogromist. But in that drone footage we also glimpsed the consequences of Sinwar’s murderous vanity. All around him we saw the wages of his futile war against the Jews. We saw the devastation of a patch of land, and of a people, that Sinwar clearly viewed as expendable entities, as mere chess pieces in his game of hate against the Jewish nation. It was brutally confirmed: courtesy of the hijacking of the Palestinian issue by the Islamist demagogues of Hamas, the very idea of Palestine is now as pulverised as that building Sinwar perished in.
The response of the woke West to the death of Sinwar has been mad, even by their standards. In the grimmest nooks of online Israelophobia, there is actual mourning. Even mainstream voices are saying Israel lied and Sinwar wasn’t in fact scurried in a tunnel underground but was on the frontline, fighting with his men. Shorter version: hero. Others say it is a grave folly on Israel’s part to think it can crush a ‘national liberation movement’ by bumping off its leaders. Honestly, the speed with which Western leftists went from saying ‘The only good fascist is a dead fascist’ to saying ‘We can’t just kill everyone in Hamas’ has been mindblowing. From puffed-up anti-fascists who fancied themselves the heirs to the International Brigades to snivelling weepers at the coffins of the fallen fascists of Hamas – it would be funny if it were not so tragic.
The category error of these garment-renders is to view Hamas as a ‘national liberation movement’. In truth, Hamas aspires not to ‘free Palestine’ but to subjugate it to the unforgiving dominion of Islamist diktat. Hamas’s aim is not the creation of a democratic, independent Palestine but the ruthless subsumption of all Palestinian territory – and Israel, of course – into the ideology of the Caliphate. By its own confession, Hamas longs to enforce not the rule of the Palestinian people but the rule of God. Until the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ is imposed ‘in this region’, it decrees, there will be ‘nothing but carnage, displacement and terror’. So it’s Islamism or death, bowing down to Allah or butchery – does that sound like liberation to you?
As I argue in my book, After the Pogrom, Hamas is ‘as far from an anti-colonial movement as it is possible to get’. Where past national liberation movements aspired, at least, to represent ‘the people’, Hamas conceives of itself as a narrow instrument of God. Where those old movements dreamed of creating a nation, Hamas dreams of subjecting a nation to God’s will – we will ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, it promises (my italics). It wants to impose on Palestine the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ – the sovereignty of the edicts of Sharia with their blind intolerance of manmade law, women’s rights and democracy itself.
The current war is a direct consequence of the Islamist delusions of the hysterics of Hamas. In their eyes, Gaza is not a terrestrial plane that ought to enjoy self-governance – it’s another front in the cosmic showdown between the ‘sovereignty of Islam’ and the ‘Jews’ usurpation of Palestine’. And the people of Gaza are not individuals deserving of life and respect – they’re mere martyrs-in-the-making, fleshy fodder for Hamas’s fanatical war on the Jews. In the words of Article 8 of the Hamas Covenant, ‘death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes’. Sinwar himself updated this deathly creed following the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel when he said dead Gazans are ‘necessary sacrifices’ to get ‘the Israelis right where we want them’.
Hamas is not a liberation movement – it’s a death cult. This is the central difference between the old armies of national liberation and Hamas’s army of God: where the former believed their people had a right to live freely, the latter thinks their people should embrace death happily. Statehood is no longer the ‘loftiest’ of goals – death is. Gazans are promised not democracy, but martyrdom; not independence, but oblivion. In declaring a religious war on Israel, in slaughtering 1,200 Jews on 7 October, Hamas brought war to Gaza and reduced an aspiring nation to a theatre of holy warfare, and its people to bit-part players in the Hamas psychosis, underlings of fundamentalism, whose highest duty is to die.
Hamas is not alone in subjugating Palestine to its own lethal narcissism. Its Islamist hijacking of the Palestine issue is more than matched by the woke hijacking of it by the lost elites of the West. They, too, bend Palestine to their vain agendas. Palestine has become the omnicause of our cultural establishments. It’s the issue through which they express their self-absorbed angst with the West itself, with modernity, with this thing we call ‘civilisation’. On our campuses, in our streets, in the media world and art world, ‘Palestine’ has become a vessel for the fashionable anxieties of the privileged. Like Hamas, these ostentatious pitiers of the Palestinians turn Palestine from a real place with real people into an abstract moral landscape in which what really matters is my hang-ups, not their aspirations.
This is the fate of the Palestinians, then: physical fodder for the holy warmongering of Hamas and moral fodder for the virtue-signalling of the West’s elites. Playthings of both the Islamist theocracy and the cultural aristocracy. And thus do those who claim to be on the side of Palestinians dehumanise them far more than Israel does, turning them into a stage army for fundamentalism, whether of the Islamist variety or the woke variety. It is hard to see where the Palestinians go from here. The dream of a Palestinian state – or even a two-state solution – has been broken on the wheel of nihilism.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
8 comments:
Bravo Brendan. A powerful piece that shines a light on what's really going on in the Middle East. One question remains however. Are there enough virgins left in Paradise to service all those martyrs?
These Jews and pholosemites Brendan are increasingly delusional. We are supposed to now believe that Hamas, just about the only thing standing between Palestinians and gruesome death or being driven from their land at the hands of the barbaric Jews, is the bigger danger to Palestians, not the Israelis who view every gentile subhuman cattle (but especially the Palestinians whose existence is an impediment to Greater Israel).
We all know that Jews are some if history's greatest story tellers, and particularly in the fantasy genre, but expecting people to disregard the evidence of their lying eyes to this degree is entering the realm of comedic farce.
IC Clairly conveniently overlooks the fact that HAMAS is the biggest story-teller on the planet after Vadimir Putin. If the HAMAS propaganda machine would bother telling us how many of the alleged 40,000 fatalities were actually HAMAS operatives, and therefore quite legitimate targets, their civilian deaths would shrink dramatically. In any case, every good Muslim despot knows civilian deaths are essential to support their victimhood narrative. No Jewish storytelling needed there. And I wonder how many real civilians were killed by the Sufi Muslim regime in Syria, or the Houthi Muslim regime in Yemen? Not a lot of Jewish input into those atrocities was there? So it seems the sooner the sooner HAMAS is crushed by Israel the sooner Gaza's civilians will be safe. And that's a story worth spreading, whoever tells it.
Nah! U.C. Wrongly.
The real tragedy of Palestine began almost 4000 years ago when a savage Near Eastern tribe murdered, pillaged and raped its way across that part of the world. A little later, they - as per the custom of the day - had founded an empire. Minor tribes either had to become vassals and pay homage or be crushed and taken into slavery. None of this sets the Hebrews apart from any other contemporary tribe, but against the background of a culture that entrenches grudges and has a very, very long memory, it tends to explain to a large degree the rabid hatred that members of Near/Middle Eastern peoples exhibit towards one another to this day.
The marauding and imperial tribe in question had its little tribal god as they all do. People in those distant days recognised the existence of the gods of other tribes, and sometimes even starting paying homage to them to butter them up if they were considered to be very powerful. On this occasion, something a bit weird happened: the tribal spook of the Hebrews engendered two other religions, namely Christianity and Islam. The world was globalising at the time (well, let's consider the Roman Empire an early stage in the evolution of globalism) and the tribal deity concept gave way to the cosmopolitan deity. In the case of Christianity, that didn't matter so much as most early Christians were not Jews but Gentile subjects who observed Roman law. The fall of the Roman Empire created a vacuum in governance and law which Islam rapidly filled. This did, however, put it at odds with the Hebrew god and kits associated governmental and legal mechanisms.
One of the things the Hebrew tribal god promised its tribe was a promised land - this was achieved during the peak of their empire. But this involved booting other people off that land. The problem became acute when the newly-found UN created the State of Israel and three quarters of a million Arabs were given their marching orders.
The 1948 events were bad enough but a movement that originated in the late 19th century in America called Zionism then enters the scene. Zionists are Jews who will only accept as legitimate the borders of the joint kingdoms that made up Israel at its imperial peak. After 1967 colonies of Zionists started building settlements outside the recognised borders of Israel. These settlements, condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice, are the root cause of the current Gaza war.
OK so that's a nutshell history of the region that cuts a few corners (what else could it do given the immensity of the topic) but it's a lot more objective and even-handed than the ideologically loaded account proferred by this appallingly biased writer.
Barend is certainly working hard on his version of history that shows it's really all the Jews own fault that nobody likes them, but he is drawing a very long bow when he says it's all because of something they did four thousand years ago. WOW. That's about as convincing as saying Brexit is just payback for the Saxon invasions. Clearly he considers the events of 1949 that created Israel as a sovereign state far too recent to be taken seriously and of course the savagery of October 6 is of no consequence whatsoever. No nation would turn the other cheek when their neighbours rained missiles on them. No nation would ignore relentless threats from their neighbours to wipe them off the map. Why should Israel be held to a different standard from every other nation in the world. We should look very carefuly at what is happening in the here and now for answers, not four millenia ago. So, good on Brendan O'Neill for making sure we get the full story, not just the warped and twisted Islamic version.
Anon 6:14 needs to work on his/her reading skills.
Nowhere do I make the case that it's ALL because of happenings 4 millennia back. On the contrary, I specifically mention the creation of the Jewish state in the last century. I never said anything about Israel not having a right to respond in kind to the outrages of October last year. My case is that what we are looking at is a 4,000-year history of conflict. Sticking to the here and now gets you nowhere when dealing with cultures that (as I pointed out already) entrench grudge-bearing and have very long memories.
Note the absence of any reaction to my bringing in Zionism, a paradigm that was coined in the late 19th century but refers back 3500-odd years to the heyday of the Jewish empire. Perhaps even Anon realises how that ideology harks back to millennia ago but would rather avoid the issue.
It's a bit rich for Barend to accuse me of avoiding an issue when he avoids the biggest issue of all, namely Islam's culpability for the turmoil in the Middle East. Every culture has a mixed back-story, but only Islam uses its history as an excuse for its present behaviour. Only Islam has relentlessly attacked the rest of the world in general, and the Jews in particular, since the seventh century. Only Islam wants to impose a world-wide theocracy based on the incoherant ramblings of a medieval warlord. That is the issue Barand. Not the long dead imperial ambitions of the Israeli tribes of three millennia ago. And certainly not the correctness of modern Israel's right to defend itself in the here and now from the clear and present danger presented by its Islamic neighbours.
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