During his visit to Tel Aviv this past week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken cataloged some of what he called Hamas’s “countless acts of terror in a litany of brutality and inhumanity,” specifying, “Babies slaughtered, bodies desecrated, young people burned alive, women raped, parents executed in front of their children, children in front of their parents.”
Blinken was shown photographs of this unspeakable savagery from the southern communities of Israel in 2023. They were not of the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation in 1940. A majority of the over 1,400 victims were veteran residents of kibbutzim, moshavim and a string of small towns and villages adjacent to the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
As more details of the barbaric and murderous attacks by Hamas are documented and shown to the world, it is becoming clear that the leaders of Hamas, the heads of the Iranian regime and their paymasters in the Qatari regime and the Palestinian Authority are equally responsible for and accessories to these unspeakable crimes. The murder, torture, mutilation of bodies and sexual assaults against innocent Jewish children, women, men and the elderly are nothing less than a pogrom reminiscent of the Holocaust and the Nazis’ genocidal war against the Jewish people.
Since its inception, Hamas has openly and consistently declared its determination to annihilate Israel and murder Jews. Their charter quotes a disputed hadith stating explicitly: “The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”
Hamas’s ideology echoes classic European antisemitism and Nazi ideology, which incited the genocide of the European Jews. The Hamas terrorists are modern day torchbearers of Nazism.
The common bond of their ideologies is the idea of “purifying” humanity of any Jewish presence. Nazi ideology spoke of “redemptive antisemitism,” a form of antisemitism that promises to “redeem” the world by exterminating the Jews. Hamas, with its “hour of judgment,” embraces exactly the same demented apocalypticism.
The export of redemptive antisemitism from Nazi Germany to parts of the Arab world during and after World War II is not merely a supplementary feature of modern radical Islamism, but its ideological core. All Islamist groups, including Hamas, embrace it, with results that we saw in full on Oct. 7.
The connection between the Palestinians and the Nazi regime is direct. A key player was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who personally met with Hitler, as well as representatives of the Nazi SS intelligence arm during the late 1930s. Not coincidentally, he also consulted with Adolf Eichmann, one of the major directors of the Holocaust. The late Yasser Arafat, whose PLO was as dedicated to murdering Jews as Hamas, was Husseini’s nephew.
What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. The PLO practically invented airplane hijacking. So, today, at every airport in every country in the world, we now line up for security checks. This is only a small example of the global danger of dismissing the axis of Jew-hatred composed of Hamas, the Iranian regime, Qatar and the P.A, among others.
Jews around the world, make no mistake. What transpired on Oct. 7 is not only a conflict, not only a war, but part of our historical struggle against those who wish to annihilate the Jewish people.