It’s safe to say Britain did not cover itself in glory this week. We’ve had legal bigwigs warning that we risk resurrecting the crime of blasphemy following the charging of a man for burning the Koran. We saw the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, announce that the UK government can’t be ar*ed with inquiries into the industrial-scale abuse of working-class girls by gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men. And now, the icing on this rancid cake: British lawyers are agitating for Hamas to no longer be designated as a terrorist organisation.
Yes, a UK legal firm is making a plea for Hamas to be ‘un-proscribed’. It’s called Riverway Law. It’s making representations for Dr Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hamas’s head of international affairs. Their case is that Britain’s use of the term ‘terrorist’ against Hamas is a breach of its supporters’ human rights. I’m not making this up. It ‘unlawfully restricts’ their freedom of speech, apparently. Welcome to modern Britain, where you must never desecrate the Koran or expect an inquiry into rape gangs, but you might soon be free to say: ‘I love Hamas.’
The lawyers have submitted a 106-page legal application to the home secretary. It wails about how unfair it is that Britain brands Hamas a terror group. Yes, how dare we use the word terrorist to describe a movement that sent thousands of armed hysterics to slit the throats of Jews on 7 October 2023? Hamas is a ‘resistance movement’, the application says, whose aim is to ‘liberate Palestine’. The trouble is, Hamas, that those of us still in possession of a moral compass know what this means: you want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East of its Jews. You want to banish, with savage violence, the Jews from their homeland. And that’s terrorism. Actually, it’s worse: it’s the dream of genocide wrapped in the lie of ‘resistance’.
Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was proscribed in 2001. Its political wing was proscribed in 2021, when the then Tory government decided that the distinction between the two was ‘artificial’. The proscription means it’s a criminal offence for anyone here to be a member of Hamas or to drum up support for it. Waving the Hamas flag and wearing pro-Hamas clothing is a crime, too. Hamas – brace yourselves for this – is now citing the European Convention on Human Rights against the UK government. Your proscription of our lovely resistance movement is an assault on our British supporters’ ‘freedom of speech’, it says.
Look, I am such a free-speech fundamentalist that I even think people should be free to say they like Hamas. Join it? Absolutely not. Fundraise for it? No way. But spout bollocks about it being a ‘resistance movement’? Yes. Such speech is surely better dealt with in the free and rowdy public sphere than in the courts. My preference would be for Cable Street-style fightbacks against Britain’s witless armies of bourgeois and Islamist sympathisers with Hamas’s neo-fascism. Instead of us phoning the police, they should be phoning ambulances – as Mosley found out, that’s the risk you take when you hit our streets and sing the praises of Jew-killers.
Yet this case – of course – is not a plea for free speech. It’s a demand that we buy into Hamas’s vile lie about being a ‘liberation and resistance movement’ that just wants to ‘confront the Zionist project’. It’s a call not for liberty but for submission – the submission of the British government, and by extension British citizens, to Hamas’s frothing hatred for the Jewish nation that it perfidiously disguises as a political challenge to Zionism. This case is of a piece with the punishingly illiberal ideology of ‘Islamophobia’, in that it seeks to ringfence Islamist extremism from our moral judgement. In this case, our moral judgement that Hamas is a terrorist group and that its war on Israel is anti-Semitic barbarism.
Here’s the thing, though: it isn’t only Hamas and its weird lawyers who think the t-word should not be applied to this murderous movement. Polite society is packed with people who refuse to call these terrorists terrorists. Remember when the BBC published that smug, pious explanation for why it doesn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’? It’s because it’s a ‘loaded word’, it said, and it isn’t our job ‘to tell people who to support and who to condemn’. Who do they think they’re kidding? The Brexit-bashing, Trump-hating BBC has suddenly discovered impartiality? It published that piece just four days after Hamas raped and butchered the Jews of southern Israel. Reith spins in his grave.
On our campuses and streets, too, it is widely argued that Hamas aren’t terrorists. Many in the lost left, the left that’s in a suicide pact with Islamism, agree with Hamas that it’s a ‘liberation movement’. Queers for Palestine would probably still holler ‘They’re not terrorists!’ even as they fell to their deaths from a tall building in Gaza. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said students at George Washington University in the US after those ‘martyrs’ murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis. Hamas’s violence is ‘resistance’ and its mass murder of Jews was a ‘day of celebration’, say the Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the privileged West.
This is the most galling thing about Hamas’s legal request to be un-proscribed: swathes of the well-educated will be nodding in vociferous agreement. That unholy alliance of the West’s upper-class Israelophobes and its radicalised young Islamists will concur entirely with Hamas’s self-flattering calumny that its slaughter of Jews is ‘resistance’. Hamas’s plea to be re-designated as a political organisation speaks to its slipperiness and wickedness. The fact that its plea will find such favour among the privileged youths who will one day run Britain and America speaks to something worse: our own societies’ ferocious turn against the virtues of civilisation, which means even the barbarism of Hamas now captures some in its spell.
Of course the UK government should wholly reject Hamas’s lunatic plea. There must also be a very serious discussion about the European Convention on Human Rights. That that document can be wielded by Hamas as part of its sick campaign to make Jew-murder look respectable suggests it really is past its sell-by date. ‘Human rights’ law is now exploited by rapists who don’t want to be deported from Britain and by a terrorist organisation that wants to fool the world into thinking its barbarism is liberation. Rip it up.
But the rest of us have a tougher task: to restore reason to society. To confront the sympathy for barbarism that surrounds us. To say out loud that Hamas are terrorists, scum, Jew exterminators. To say Western civilisation is superior to Islamism, and to ignore the inevitable wails of ‘Islamophobe!’ that will follow.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
The lawyers have submitted a 106-page legal application to the home secretary. It wails about how unfair it is that Britain brands Hamas a terror group. Yes, how dare we use the word terrorist to describe a movement that sent thousands of armed hysterics to slit the throats of Jews on 7 October 2023? Hamas is a ‘resistance movement’, the application says, whose aim is to ‘liberate Palestine’. The trouble is, Hamas, that those of us still in possession of a moral compass know what this means: you want to ‘liberate’ the Middle East of its Jews. You want to banish, with savage violence, the Jews from their homeland. And that’s terrorism. Actually, it’s worse: it’s the dream of genocide wrapped in the lie of ‘resistance’.
Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, was proscribed in 2001. Its political wing was proscribed in 2021, when the then Tory government decided that the distinction between the two was ‘artificial’. The proscription means it’s a criminal offence for anyone here to be a member of Hamas or to drum up support for it. Waving the Hamas flag and wearing pro-Hamas clothing is a crime, too. Hamas – brace yourselves for this – is now citing the European Convention on Human Rights against the UK government. Your proscription of our lovely resistance movement is an assault on our British supporters’ ‘freedom of speech’, it says.
Look, I am such a free-speech fundamentalist that I even think people should be free to say they like Hamas. Join it? Absolutely not. Fundraise for it? No way. But spout bollocks about it being a ‘resistance movement’? Yes. Such speech is surely better dealt with in the free and rowdy public sphere than in the courts. My preference would be for Cable Street-style fightbacks against Britain’s witless armies of bourgeois and Islamist sympathisers with Hamas’s neo-fascism. Instead of us phoning the police, they should be phoning ambulances – as Mosley found out, that’s the risk you take when you hit our streets and sing the praises of Jew-killers.
Yet this case – of course – is not a plea for free speech. It’s a demand that we buy into Hamas’s vile lie about being a ‘liberation and resistance movement’ that just wants to ‘confront the Zionist project’. It’s a call not for liberty but for submission – the submission of the British government, and by extension British citizens, to Hamas’s frothing hatred for the Jewish nation that it perfidiously disguises as a political challenge to Zionism. This case is of a piece with the punishingly illiberal ideology of ‘Islamophobia’, in that it seeks to ringfence Islamist extremism from our moral judgement. In this case, our moral judgement that Hamas is a terrorist group and that its war on Israel is anti-Semitic barbarism.
Here’s the thing, though: it isn’t only Hamas and its weird lawyers who think the t-word should not be applied to this murderous movement. Polite society is packed with people who refuse to call these terrorists terrorists. Remember when the BBC published that smug, pious explanation for why it doesn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’? It’s because it’s a ‘loaded word’, it said, and it isn’t our job ‘to tell people who to support and who to condemn’. Who do they think they’re kidding? The Brexit-bashing, Trump-hating BBC has suddenly discovered impartiality? It published that piece just four days after Hamas raped and butchered the Jews of southern Israel. Reith spins in his grave.
On our campuses and streets, too, it is widely argued that Hamas aren’t terrorists. Many in the lost left, the left that’s in a suicide pact with Islamism, agree with Hamas that it’s a ‘liberation movement’. Queers for Palestine would probably still holler ‘They’re not terrorists!’ even as they fell to their deaths from a tall building in Gaza. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said students at George Washington University in the US after those ‘martyrs’ murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis. Hamas’s violence is ‘resistance’ and its mass murder of Jews was a ‘day of celebration’, say the Fisher-Price revolutionaries of the privileged West.
This is the most galling thing about Hamas’s legal request to be un-proscribed: swathes of the well-educated will be nodding in vociferous agreement. That unholy alliance of the West’s upper-class Israelophobes and its radicalised young Islamists will concur entirely with Hamas’s self-flattering calumny that its slaughter of Jews is ‘resistance’. Hamas’s plea to be re-designated as a political organisation speaks to its slipperiness and wickedness. The fact that its plea will find such favour among the privileged youths who will one day run Britain and America speaks to something worse: our own societies’ ferocious turn against the virtues of civilisation, which means even the barbarism of Hamas now captures some in its spell.
Of course the UK government should wholly reject Hamas’s lunatic plea. There must also be a very serious discussion about the European Convention on Human Rights. That that document can be wielded by Hamas as part of its sick campaign to make Jew-murder look respectable suggests it really is past its sell-by date. ‘Human rights’ law is now exploited by rapists who don’t want to be deported from Britain and by a terrorist organisation that wants to fool the world into thinking its barbarism is liberation. Rip it up.
But the rest of us have a tougher task: to restore reason to society. To confront the sympathy for barbarism that surrounds us. To say out loud that Hamas are terrorists, scum, Jew exterminators. To say Western civilisation is superior to Islamism, and to ignore the inevitable wails of ‘Islamophobe!’ that will follow.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
6 comments:
The hypocrisy and one-sided Zionist argument promulgated by people like Brendan O'Neill is blatant and is convincing fewer and fewer people.
What they deliberately overlook is that a "terrorist" group is not an objective classification, it depends entirely on whose interests such a classification serves. For instance, if it suits their interests, the Judeo-Americans will work with and support groups with all the same characteristics of Hamas, whereas they will target and condemn others - all due to interests, nothing to do with morality.
Look at Israel itself: founded in blood and violence committed against Arabs and British by Jews under the auspices of (what they would consider) "liberation" groups like the Irgun and Lehi. By any objective standard, these Jewish groups of the 30s and 40s are just as violent, if not more so, than Hamas. But the difference is, Israelis can't acknowledge the similarities, because then what I am saying becomes obvious: they are utter hypocrites who want to make themselves out as "victims of the fascistic Hamas" so they can get sympathy and excuse their own atrocities.
You don't have to support Hamas to understand why they exist, which is not blind and irrational hatred of Jews, but because of Jewish behaviour towards Palestinian Arabs. At the very least, Hamas and Israel are equally forces for bad and the world would be better off without both, but more realistically, Israel is and has always been the main protagonist and driver of the cycle of violence in the region, and the principal reason why "terrorist" groups oppose them.
To believe the completely one-sided pro-Israel view that Brendan O'Neill believes you'd have to be very ignorant or wilfully blind.
Well I never. Madam B asserting someone else is "very ignorant or wilfully blind". I guess it takes one to think they know one. So apparently Israel "was founded in blood and violence committed against Arabs and British by Jews". Could have sworn Israel was founded by Resolution 181 of the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 that called for the partition of Trans-Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. You know. The "two state solution" that is fashionable in modern-day diplomatic circles. But history records the Islamic States surrounding Trans-Jordan rejected the two-state solution from the outset and chose the time-honoured Islamic solution, blood and violence. It was they who invaded the territory to which Israel was legally entitled. It didn't work. And all the subsequent blood and violence down to the present day has been instigated or provoked by the those same Islamic States, and latterly their client militias like HAMAS. It still hasn't worked. No wonder the two-state solution is back in fashion.
Unless of course you are HAMAS, whose whole reason for existence is to wipe Israel off the map in pursuit of the Islamic dream of a world-wide caliphate. So don't give me that crap about them protecting the Palestinian people. HAMAS regards the people as just foot soldiers for Islam who have a Koranic duty to die for the holy cause. HAMAS will fight to the last Gazan to enforce that mindless nonsense. Madam B. did get one thing right though. That's got nothing to do with morality.
For once Jones Boy I totally agree with ,and endorse you comments. Well said
Israel, backed by the Trump administration, is poised to carry out the largest campaign of ethnic cleansing since the end of World War II.
Since March 2, it has blocked all food and humanitarian aid into Gaza and cut off electricity, so that the last water desalination plant no longer functions. The Israeli military has seized half of the territory — Gaza is 25 miles long and four to five miles wide — and placed two-thirds of Gaza under displacement orders, rendered “no-go zones,” including the border town of Rafah, which is encircled by Israeli troops.
Since Israel’s unilateral ending of the ceasefire on March 18 — which was never honored by Israel — Israel has been carrying out relentless bombing and shelling against civilians, killing over 1,400 Palestinians and wounding over 3,600, according to the Palestinian health ministry. An average of one hundred children are being killed daily according to the United Nations.
The genocide in Gaza is the greatest crime of this century. It will come back to haunt Israel. It will come back to haunt us. It will usher to our doorsteps the evil we have perpetrated on the Palestinians.
You reap what you sow. We have sown a minefield of hatred and violence, and the way of Palestine will be the way of the world.
Anon 8.53 needs to be very careful how s/he uses that phrase "You reap what you sow". In 2003 Israel unilaterally withdrew its settlers and military from Gaza and gave it to the locals to run. HAMAS immediately began sowing the seeds of hatred in support of their stated aim of destroying the State of Israel. Israel was remarkably constrained in the face of that provocation but could no longer tolerate the situation once HAMAS undertook its relentless missile bombardment, culminating in the merciless slaughter of innocent Israeli citizens on October 7. HAMAS is therefore entirely responsible for the subsequent "reaping". They only have to return the hostages and guarantee Israel''s right to exist and the war will stop. In other words, behave in a civilised and responsible manner. Until that happens Israel will continue to do whatever it takes to protect its right to exist. Perhaps the long suffering inhabitants of Gaza could take matters into their own hands and eject the HAMAS fighters from their midst. Because until they do that, they are simply giving aid and comfort to the instigators of their misery. Another case of sowing what they have reaped I guess.
Madame B-S. This is an opinion piece. The author is giving us his views on a current legal case in the UK. You can agree or disagree with his view. Just as I can disagree with your point of view.
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