NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {T} he Muslim Brotherhood echo chamber in the media-Democrat complex is tacitly, grudgingly amending its headlines. Progressives on Capitol Hill are sticking by their libels, but the New York Times’ screaming homepage banner, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say,” is finally gone, replaced by a banner reading “In Passionate Speech, Biden Embraces Israel as Protests Rage Over Gaza Blast.”
Translation: Now that Israel can’t credibly be blamed for firing the rocket that hit the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, the question of who did it no longer matters to the defenders of jihadists and their sharia-supremacist masters. They move on now to the regional tumult that they blame on the “Gaza Blast” (as if it happened spontaneously) rather than on their reckless coverage of the explosion, which was apparently caused by a makeshift rocket — one of the countless that frequently malfunction — fired by Hamas’s confederate, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Note that the media, which hold Donald Trump accountable for inciting the Capitol riot even though he didn’t quite commit criminally actionable incitement, are by their own logic accountable for inciting the rioting at Israeli, American, and other Western facilities in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and elsewhere. That will pass in silence.
Islamic Jihad’s mass-murdering of its fellow Palestinian Muslims — apparently an accident, though murder all the same, since the intent was to slaughter hundreds of Jews — raises a number of salient points.
To begin with, there’s the law-of-war concept of proportionality that we’ve been discussing. The IDF has released an intercepted conversation between Hamas jihadists discussing how their Islamic Jihad allies shot the missile from a cemetery right outside the hospital. Again, they were aiming at Israel but the device exploded prematurely. Meaning: the vicinity of the hospital was not struck by the Israelis, but if it had been it would have been a legitimate military target.
This is how jihadists fight. They store and deploy their arsenals from what is called “civilian” infrastructure (more on that momentarily). If Israel fires at them and their weapons, jihadists scream “war crime!” for the consumption of Western media, European chancelleries, and Democrats. Those constituencies, in turn, dutifully demand that Israel cease and desist.
Moreover, the jihadists instruct noncombatant Palestinians to defy Israel’s pleas for them to evacuate combat zones where important military targets are located. If the noncombatants do leave, the media echo the Islamist-Leftist story line that Israel is committing a war crime by displacing “civilians”; if they stay and Israel attacks, the same media trumpet the alternative Islamist-Leftist narrative that Israel is committing war crimes through “disproportionate” strikes in which “civilians” are killed.
Either way, they’ve got it covered. But as you listen to the slanderous news accounts of the last 24 hours and watch the ensuing riots, bear in mind that if Israel had fired on Islamic Jihad as it fired a missile from the perimeter of the hospital, Israel’s attack would have been entirely legitimate . . . and yet the usual suspects would have been ranting and rioting all the same.
And the ground assault hasn’t even started yet. What do you figure coverage of that is going to be like?
The murderous misfire has also brought welcome attention to the facts that the jihadists are not always competent; that much of their weaponry is crude; and that about 40 percent of their rockets end up being misfires, many of which land in Gaza. And, because the media credulously take their information from Hamas-controlled authorities — such as the Gaza Health Ministry — Israel gets blamed for the resulting casualties, as Noah Rothman explains.
None of the statistics washing over us is reliable: Deaths, injuries, and property destruction are deemed attributable to “the occupation,” not the proximate cause: jihadist attacks gone awry.
We should not lose sight of why Muslim noncombatants are so routinely killed by jihadists — sometimes by accident, but often quite intentionally. It’s an important part of jihadist ideology. It’s the reason I put the word civilian in sneer-quotes, above.
The objective of the Palestinians’ jihad is to destroy Israel. In their view, this is a divinely ordained mission, and everything, very much including every life on their own side, jihadist or noncombatant, is to be sacrificed as necessary to succeed. Among themselves, they do not draw the sharp distinction, as we in the West do, between combatants (permissible targets) and civilians (persons as to whom reasonable measures should be taken to minimize casualties).
Civilian is a Western concept for that which befits the life of the citizen. Both civilian and citizen (English words derived from French) are rooted in the Latin civis, the Roman concept of the citizen (civitas refers to the community of citizens). This concept is alien to sharia supremacism — the ideology based on a fundamentalist construction of sharia, Islam’s societal plan cum legal code, said to have been prescribed by Allah and set in stone by Muslim scholars over a millennium ago. Sharia supremacism does not envision a nation of citizens who have rights as well as obligations. To the contrary, the sharia state comprises a ruler and subjects — the ruler obliged to enforce sharia faithfully, the subjects bound to obey the ruler as long as he does.
In the West, we recoil at military operations that harm civilians, especially if they target civilians. We believe civilians have natural rights, including an unalienable right to life. This is not how sharia supremacists see things. What we deem civilians they deem subjects who are duty bound to support the jihad — including dying for it if that helps the cause. This is why jihadists take blood-curdling delight in warning us, “We love death more than you love life.”
Hamas has no compunction about blocking noncombatant Palestinians from evacuating war zones and using such noncombatants as human shields. Why? Because the resulting deaths make the jihad more likely to succeed. We’re seeing that in spades right now. Publicity about Palestinian “civilians” killed in combat operations does far more to paralyze the Israeli military than forcible jihadist attacks do. The IDF can overcome last weekend’s unprecedented savagery; it remains to be seen whether Israel can deal with Western allies whose support wilts when Israelis are fighting back rather than being slaughtered.
Given that Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, I have taken to reminding people of the Brotherhood’s motto. It is not just a mindlessly chanted slogan. This is what they believe — and play close attention to the last two lines:
Allah is our objective,
the Prophet is our leader,
the Quran is our law,
Jihad is our way,
and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
In the jihad, a subject of the sharia authorities who is killed by either side, and whose killing can be framed as a “civilian casualty” caused by the “occupation” of what is regarded — from the River to the Sea — as Muslim territory, has “died in the way of Allah.” For the sharia supremacist, that is the highest hope — the antithesis of tragedy.
For Hamas, two of the most influential figures in history are Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, and Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian-born sharia jurisprudent taken by Hamas as its guiding light.
Banna preached that “death is art.” In his classic 1960 study, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, the Arabist scholar Robert P. Mitchell observed that Banna understood what made jihad effective: the “relationship always implied between [jihad] and the possibility, even the necessity of death and martyrdom.” As Mitchell elaborated:
Victory can only come with the mastery of “the art of death. . . .” The movement cannot succeed, Banna insists, without this dedicated and unqualified kind of jihad.
Last year, the jihad-mongering Qaradawi died in peace at 96. But in 2009, he had reflected on the blaze of glory for which he yearned:
The only thing I hope for is that, as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.
Whether we want to face up to it or not, Qaradawi was wildly popular in the Palestinian territories and the broader Middle East, where his weekly Al Jazeera broadcast, Sharia and Life, routinely drew tens of millions of viewers. The Hamas organization he inspired did not sack Gaza; it forcibly ousted rival Fatah only after winning a 2006 popular election — and it would be elected in the West Bank, too, if Fatah permitted a vote. A majority of Palestinians favor renewal of armed intifada, agreeing that the best strategy for ending “the occupation” is forcible attacks.
For Hamas and its supporters, who are far more numerous than the Biden administration would have us believe, death is not a tragedy. It is a strategy.