Jihad: The Genocidal Force Threatening the Free World

October 7, some 3,000 Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel and massacred 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children in the most lethal pogrom against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The Hamas killer squads ruthlessly wiped out entire Israeli families, including babies and Holocaust survivors. Hamas also took some 240 hostages from Israel and several other countries including women, children, and the elderly. U.S. President Joe Biden noted that Hamas’s barbarism was so extreme that it made ISIS terrorists look “somewhat rational.” What was the driving force behind the unprecedented Hamas atrocities?

U.N. Chief Guterres: Hamas attack did not happen in a vacuum

In late October, at which point Israel had barely managed to identify all the victims because of their gruesome state, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres caused controversy by stating that the massacre was motivated by grievances, and that it, therefore, “did not happen in a vacuum.”

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said. The U.N. chief went on to selectively recycle old Arab accusations against Israel. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.”

Critics understandably slammed Guterres for his attempt to whitewash the Nazi-style slaughter by Hamas of innocent civilians.

The U.N. chief’s lack of moral clarity, however, is unsurprising. The United Nations was established after the Second World War to prevent future wars and atrocities. However, the U.N. quickly abandoned its original mission and became a political weapon at the hands of the world’s most oppressive and bigoted regimes, such as China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Syria.

However, Guterres unintentionally got one thing right: Hamas’ mass murder definitely did not happen in a vacuum—but not for the reasons Guterres presented.

Hamas did not perpetrate its atrocities against Israeli civilians because of the “occupation,” Israeli “settlements,” or poverty. The Gaza Strip, where Hamas rules unopposed, is a territory from which Israel withdrew completely in 2005, when it uprooted 8,000 Israeli residents and even dug up its dead to rebury them inside Israel.

On October 6, the day before the Hamas massacre, not a single Israeli soldier occupied even an inch of the Judenrein Gaza Strip, which, if Hamas had been so inclined, could have developed into a Middle Eastern Singapore. However, Hamas has no interest in progress and freedom. The terror group decided to wipe out entire Jewish families shortly after Israel had greenlighted a larger inflow of Gazan workers to make a living in Israel.

Jihad against Israel + the Jewish people

The Hamas killers chose their victims solely based on who they were: Jews. The driving force behind that choice was not the grievances that Guterres regurgitated, but the millennium-old idea of jihad or “holy war” against Jews and other “infidels” who are considered enemies of Islam.

Since its rebirth in May of 1948, Israel has not experienced a single day of genuine peace and is still surrounded by enemies—like Hamas—who openly call for the Jewish state’s destruction. While the Western world tends to view the dispute between Muslim Arabs and Israel as a territorial conflict, it is an existential conflict. From an Islamist perspective, an independent Jewish state, no matter how tiny, constitutes an abomination that challenges Islam’s traditional view of Jews as dhimmis, a non-Muslim minority that can periodically enjoy “protection” but only as subservient subjects under Islamic domination—never as an independent and equal nation. The genocidal, racist core of jihad is reflected in the popular slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase constitutes a total rejection of the internationally proposed two-state solution. In practice it means the destruction of the Jewish state and the establishment of a Muslim Arab entity on the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Anti-Zionist Arabists have constructed a false narrative of seemingly idyllic Muslim-Jewish coexistence prior to the establishment of modern Israel. While there were periods when Jewish existence was comparatively less precarious among Muslims than among Christians, Jews were never treated like equals in the Islamic world. Just like in Medieval Christian Europe, humiliating ghettos and anti-Jewish pogroms were integral components of the Jewish experience in Muslim-majority societies over the centuries.

Unlike the Christian West, the Muslim world never underwent a modern cultural and religious renaissance. Islam still views Jews with contempt and the anti-Jewish impulse originates in the Muslim Koran. A popular chant among contemporary Islamists is “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh, Jews, the army of Mohammed will return!” While this phrase means nothing to most Westerners, it constitutes a chilling threat of genocide against Jews. Khaybar is the name of a historic oasis in the Arabian Peninsula in present-day Saudi Arabia. The biography of Mohammed describes how, in the year 628, his forces expelled and slaughtered “treasonous” Jewish communities who lived in the oasis. In other words, contemporary Islamists celebrate this genocidal story as a Muslim victory against Jews to be replicated in modern times against Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.

Hamas—a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot with Nazi roots

Hamas was formally established in 1987 during the First Intifada in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. However, Hamas’s ideological roots predate the modern State of Israel and can be traced to Egypt in the late 1920s. In 1928, the Egyptian Imam Hassan al-Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist organization that blended traditional Islamist concepts of jihad with Nazi trends imported from Europe. Mr. al-Banna admired Adolf Hitler and had the Nazi leader’s work Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) translated into Arabic with the altered title My Jihad. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood embraced an intense hatred of Jews and called for the elimination of Jews living in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world.

Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that has fully embraced the ideologically toxic cocktail blend of Islamo-fascism and Nazism. Unsurprisingly, Hamas became one of the most anti-Semitic organizations to emerge on the world scene since the Holocaust’s industrial murder of six million Jews.

A popular modern anti-Jewish narrative argues that Arabs in the British Palestine Mandate paid the price of Nazi atrocities against Jews during the Holocaust by becoming homeless through the reestablishment of a Jewish state in 1948. However, this false narrative ignores the historical fact that only the Hebrew nation established a homeland in the Land of Israel. No Arab and certainly no “Palestinian” state existed prior to modern Israel’s establishment in May 1948. The Holy Land was for centuries a backwater in the crumbling Ottoman empire until the British took control after the First World War.

In November 1947, the United Nations voted in favor of partitioning the British Palestine Mandate into one Jewish state and one Arab state. The Jewish side accepted the proposal. By contrast, the Arab side rejected it and initiated a jihad against the nascent Jewish state.

Furthermore, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was the leader of the Arab population in British Palestine, was an ardent Nazi Jew-hater who cultivated personal relations with Adolf Hitler. Al-Husseini praised the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry and advocated the same Final Solution for the Jews in the Land of Israel and the wider Middle East.

While many Palestinian Jews volunteered to serve in the British military during the Second World War, the Muslim Arab world enthusiastically embraced pro-German and pro-Nazi sentiments in the 1940s. After the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, several Nazi war criminals found refuge in Arab states such as Egypt and Syria, where they were welcomed as heroes and served as senior advisors to Arab despots.

Hamas openly calls for Israel’s destruction 

Many modern Westerners find the Islamo-fascist ideology of Hamas difficult to comprehend. However, outside observers like U.N. chief Guterres should pay attention to what Hamas leaders say. In an interview with Lebanese TV on October 27, senior Hamas terrorist Ghazi Hamad defended the October 7 massacre, vowing that Hamas will perpetrate future massacres of Jews “again and again” with “full force” until Israel is destroyed.

“The al-Aqsa Flood [Hamas name for the massacre] is just the first time and there will be a second, a third, a fourth because we have the determination, the resolve and the capabilities to fight,” Hamad stated. The senior Hamas official ruled out any prospects for potential compromise and peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state within any borders. “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove that country because it constitutes a security, military, and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nations, and must be finished,” Hamad said. “We are not ashamed to say this, with full force. We must teach Israel a lesson and we will do this again and again,” he threatened.

The White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby condemned the Hamas official for his “chilling comments” about wiping Israel off the map. “That’s what Israel faces,” added the senior Biden administration official as if he had just experienced the moon landing for the first time.

Hamas’s Nazi-style charter

Many left-wing pundits have previously frequently dismissed Hamas’s deeply anti-Semitic statements as empty slogans meant for internal Muslim Arab consumption. In a similar fashion, many observers dismissed the Nazi genocidal threats in the 1930s. However, Hamas’s October 7 massacre truly shocked many naïve but well-meaning people in the world and even in Israel.

Some noted the irony that many of the murdered and kidnapped Israeli civilians from the border kibbutzim were ardent peace champions who had spent years advocating coexistence with Gazans as their neighbors. Some had even assisted sick Gazan children in receiving advanced medical care in Israeli hospitals. However, none of this is relevant to Hamas and its many supporters, who hate all Jews regardless of their political affiliation and level of religious observance. Hamas is not interested in living in peace with Israel. Hamas wants Israel’s 7 million Jews to rest in peace and establish an Islamic state on the ruins of the Jewish state.

While horrifying in its complete disregard for human life, the October 7 atrocities should not have surprised anyone who is vaguely familiar with the Hamas Charter, which was adopted in 1988. It is beyond any doubt one of the most anti-Semitic documents in the post-Holocaust era. The genocidal charter openly calls for the destruction of Israel: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”

The Hamas extremist ideology therefore leaves no room for any compromise or peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state within any boundaries. In this context, Hamas only seeks ceasefires to regroup and rearm for its next aggression against the Jewish nation.

Iran—the Jihad octopus seeking Israel’s destruction

While Hamas is a dangerous terrorist organization with genocidal intentions, it is merely a tentacle of the main threat to Israel’s existence—the jihad octopus of the Ayatollah’s Iran. Prior to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Israel and Iran enjoyed close commercial and security ties. However, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, quickly demonized Israel as the “Little Satan” and the United States as the “Great Satan.”

The Iranian ayatollah regime remains committed to a messianic ideology that awaits the arrival of the Mahdi, a future final Islamic leader who is supposed to arrive at the end of times and rid the world of injustice. By falsely branding Israel and the Jewish people as “enemies of Islam,” the ayatollah regime’s fanatical apocalyptic ideology demands the destruction of Israel as a precondition for the arrival of the Mahdi. Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, has continued this genocidal jihad ideology against the Jewish state. In 2020, Khamenei called Israel a “cancerous tumor” that “will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.” This is the central message that the supreme leader and other senior Iranian leaders have stated repeatedly over the years.

The Iranian regime’s genocidal threats are not limited to mere words. The ayatollahs are also advancing the means to implement this strategic goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map.

Iran has invested heavily in developing a vast and diverse arsenal of missiles, including long-range missiles that can reach all of the Middle East including Israel and parts of Europe. Tehran also seeks to develop long-range intercontinental missiles that could one day reach the eastern coast of the United States.

While officially denying it, the Iranian ayatollah regime has invested vast resources into developing an advanced covert nuclear program with the strategic goal of acquiring nuclear bombs. Since Israel is believed to possess at least dozens of nuclear warheads, some pundits have argued that this would deter Iran in a similar fashion as the American-Soviet nuclear stand-off during the Cold War.

However, the comparison is misleading because the ayatollahs believe in an apocalyptic death cult with a modus operandi that differs greatly from the Russians. In 2002, the former “reformist” Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani argued that Tehran views Israel as a one-nuclear-bomb country due to its tiny size, whereas the vast Muslim world could sustain a nuclear exchange.

“The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything,” Rafsanjani said. Nuclear weapons at the hands of the ayatollahs therefore constitute an existential threat to the Jewish state’s future.

Finally, the ayatollahs have invested considerable resources in building a vast network of terror proxies across the Middle East region. The purpose is to enhance Tehran’s regional power and encircle the Jewish state with pro-Iranian terror militaries along its borders. Iranian terror proxies include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and pro-Iranian terror militias in Syria and Iraq. Hezbollah is undoubtedly the most powerful Iranian terror proxy with an arsenal of around 150,000 rockets that can reach any point inside the Jewish state.

While Hamas carried out the October 7 massacre against Israeli civilians, Iran’s footprints are all over the atrocities. The Iranian regime provides funding, training, and military equipment for Hamas and the smaller Gaza-based terror group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Attacking Israel and American targets in the Middle East through terror proxies has so far offered the Iranian regime a convenient veneer of plausible deniability that lowers the risk of direct military confrontations with the American and Israeli militaries. The Iranian regime praised the Hamas massacre but denied that it had been involved in it. However, The Wall Street Journal reported that hundreds of Gaza-based terrorists underwent “specialized combat training” in the Islamic Republic of Iran merely weeks before October 7. Hamas officials have also thanked Iran for its considerable assistance.

It starts with the Jews; it doesn’t end with the Jews

The Islamic Republic of Iran and Nazi Germany share several chilling characteristics. The ayatollahs share Hitler’s ambition of world domination. A strategic goal for the ayatollahs is to export their toxic Islamic revolution worldwide through jihad, terror, and propaganda. The ayatollahs share Hitler’s paranoia and anti-Semitic conspiracy-based worldview that the Jews are responsible for all ills in the world. The elimination of the Jews is therefore a top priority for the Iranian ayatollahs just like it was for Nazi Germany. Like Nazi Germany, the Iranian ayatollahs use demonization of Jews as a propaganda tool to lay the groundwork for their elimination.

However, what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews. Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews but also unleashed a global war that claimed the lives of around 60 million people. The Islamo-fascist ayatollahs and their minions have made it clear that Israel is merely the “Little Satan” while America is the “Great Satan.” The ayatollahs’ ultimate goal is Islamist world domination through the establishment of a global Caliphate. The West long viewed Islamist terrorism as a Middle Eastern and Jewish problem. However, 9/11 made jihad terrorism a Western and global problem.

French President Emannuel Macron recently stressed that Israel’s fight against terrorism is, in fact, the entire free world’s fight against terrorism. “This fight against terrorism is obviously a matter of existence for Israel, but it’s a matter of existence for all of us,” Macron stated during his solidarity visit to Israel.

In his seminal book A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, the late, prominent anti-Semitism expert Professor Robert Wistrich warned of potentially devastating global consequences unless the Iranian ayatollah regime is stopped and neutralized.

“Unless it is checked in time the lethal triad of anti-Semitism, terror, and jihad is capable of universal conflagration,” he wrote. “A deadly strain of genocidal anti-Semitism brings the nightmare of a nuclear Armageddon one step closer and with it the need for more resolute preventive action.”