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The chief political columnist for the British online publication Spiked, Brendan O’Neill has a bone to pick with those who describe the late and unlamented Ismail Haniyeh as a “moderate.” More on his furious rejoinder to those nitwits can be found here: “Ismail Haniyeh was a monster, not a ‘moderate,’” by Brendan O’Neill, Spiked, July 31, 2024:
Forget ‘centrist dads’, there’s a new political character in town: the centrist fascist. The moderate Jew-killer. The middle-of-the-road cheerleader of mass murder. It’s Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, who was bumped off in Tehran yesterday, presumably by the Israel Defence Forces. Reading the strangely pained media coverage of his death, you could be forgiven for thinking he’d been a pragmatic, upstanding guy, someone who was considered ‘very moderate’, in the words of Sky News crank, Alex Crawford. In truth, of course, he was a militant anti-Semite and we should spend as much time mourning his passing as he did the Jews his comrades butchered on 7 October: ie, none.
The m-word I expected to see in the commentary on Haniyeh was ‘murderous’ – the m-word I got was ‘moderate’. For all his ‘tough rhetoric’, he was actually ‘moderate and pragmatic’, says BBC correspondent, Yolande Knell. That ‘tough rhetoric’ included calling the 7 October pogrom a ‘victory’, agitating for a further ‘jihad of the swords’ (that is, more Jew murder), and chanting about the ‘army of Muhammad’ returning to wreak vengeance on Jews. BBC types will damn you as a crazy extremist if you say women don’t have cocks, and then straight-up depict a man who wanted to draw swords against Jews as a moderate.
Western observers seem obsessed with ‘de-escalation’ in the Middle East. They want calm. But what is calm for them is potential catastrophe for the Jewish State. The ‘peace’ these people call for would be the peace of the grave for many Israelis. Hamas has promised to carry out more 7 Octobers. For Israel to leave such a movement intact would be risky in the extreme. The assassination of Ismail Haniyeh sends a clear message to the world, and it’s one that every true progressive ought to welcome: namely, that you cannot kill Jews with impunity anymore. Fascist violence has consequences now.
Well, Brendan O’Neill, just one word to add to your terrific burst of fury against those who insist on praising a terrorist murderer as a “moderate.” You mention that Haniyeh had been “living a life of luxury” in Doha. So he was, but there’s more to that story. This “defender of the Palestinians” in Gaza had managed, before being hoist by a well-planted Israeli petard, to accumulate a fortune of $4 billion, every cent of which was stolen by him from foreign aid meant for the people of Gaza. Kindly add that to your bill of particulars.