Ron Dermer, Israel’s new Ambassador to the United States, claims that Israel is fighting not just a war against Hamas, but a larger war against the growing moral impairment of what used to be called the civilized world; not just to defeat Hamas militarily but to restore moral clarity to a world that refuses to accept there is such a thing.
Israel will certainly win its current war against Hamas. In fact, it has already done so, but victory in the war for moral clarity– for the virtue of acknowledging the proper value of human life– is far less certain.
As Dennis Prager writes in Townhall, “The moral gulf between Israel and Hamas is as clear and great as the one between the Allies and Nazi Germany.”
That Hamas is a terror group engaging in multiple war crimes as agreed and codified in a serious of international treaties commonly known as the Geneva conventions should be evident even to the most morally challenged. Firing at civilians, from behind civilians, while blocking the escape of their own civilians trying to heed Israeli warnings? The baseball world would call it three strikes your out. A morally centered world would call it a triple war crime. Alas, the world we live in is not morally centered.
Hamas commits all of the war crimes mentioned above and will commit any others it can devise for precisely the same reason that Nazi Germany committed them. Because just like Nazi Germany, Hamas is committed to genocide against the Jewish people.
And unlike Nazi Germany, Hamas exists for no other purpose than to commit genocide. Not even the Nazis claimed their only purpose was to murder the Jews. Adolf Hitler’s first job as a young member of the brand new National Socialist German Worker’s Party in 1920 was to draft the group’s founding principles, goals and values. He called it the National Socialist Program and it contained 25 points. The National Socialist program contained provisions demanding everything from the unification of all Germans inside one Germany, the abrogation of the hated Versailles Treaty and expulsion of all non-Germans from Germany, the abolition of all unearned income, the confiscation of all war profits, the division of all profits and the expansion of all old age pensions. Only two of the 25 points mentioned Jews.
Not so Hamas. Hamas stands separate and distinct from all their evil predecessors, even Hitler’s Germany, which was strongly supported by the Arab world.
Established in 1987 as the Palestinian branch of Egyptian Muslim Hamas, which is an Arabic acronym for the ‘Islamic Resistance Movement” was created and exists today to pursue only one goal. Hamas’ founding charter makes abundantly clear that its fundamental purpose is to destroy the State of Israel and to murder all the Jews in it.
“The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 0 Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come forward and kill him!” proclaims Hamas’ founding document.
While Nazi Germany pursued whole scale genocide against the Jews with a merciless abandon that culminated in the Holocaust of World War II — genocide itself was never a stated, public objective of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime. Far from it. Research libraries are overflowing with documentary evidence of the extraordinary steps the Nazis took to hide their genocide of the Jews. Only in private did the Nazis gloat at how many Jews they were able to murder. To their own people, they denied it all and went to great lengths to destroy evidence of their monumental crimes. Even Nazis had a sense of shame.
Not so Hamas. Hamas does not hide its genocidal intent. It celebrates it. Hamas does not destroy evidence of its attempts at genocide; it puts those attempts to music and broadcasts them on youtube. Hamas isn’t ashamed it seeks to murder every Jew it can. It is the source of its greatest pride
Much as they would like us all to believe otherwise however, celebrating genocide is not a Hamas invention. Hamas learned it from the more “moderate” PLO. The central square of Ramallah, the current administrative center of the Palestinian Authority, as the former PLO is now known, is named after Dalal al-Magribi, the notorious terror mastermind behind the horrifying 1978 Coastal Road Massacre. The main Ramallah thoroughfare is named for Yehya Ayash, the terrorist who boasted of murdering hundreds of Jewish civilians as leader of Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades.
No town squares in the Third Reich were rechristened to honor gas chamber operators. No soccer stadiums in Hitler’s Germany were named to celebrate Einsatzgruppen commanders. Not so Hamas. Dozens of streets and soccer stadiums in Palestinian towns have been renamed to honor and glorify its own foot soldiers of genocide– the hallowed suicide bomber.
Hamas’ intent to murder all the Jews of Israel today is no different than Hitler’s intent to murder all the Jews of Europe two generations ago.
When it comes to Jewish genocide, capability is all that distinguishes Hamas and Nazi Germany. Not will, not desire, certainly not intent; only ability.
The Nazis were able to murder six million Jews during World War II because Jews had no capability to defend themselves. Hamas hasn’t been able murder any Jews during its current war against Israel because today’s Jews defend themselves with the most capable anti-terror army in the world.