Hamas is the symptom, not the disease Opinion by National Review

National Review has published an article arguing that the terror group was elected by Palestinians in Gaza precisely because it wants to destroy Israel and murder Jewish people. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

In his same old, same old Oval Office address on Thursday night, President Biden noted that during his just-completed trip to Israel he managed to speak with “President” Mahmoud Abbas of the “Palestinian Authority.”

I say managed because other Arab leaders blew off the leader of the free world (such as he is) after the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the BBC hysterically claimed — based on their crack sources in the Gaza Health Ministry (a.k.a. Hamas) — that a jihadist terrorist attack gone awry in the vicinity of a hospital was actually an Israeli war crime targeting children and other civilians.

The episode proves, yet again, that a lie can make its way around the world before the truth straps its boots on — and that, in our digital age, the lie becomes “the narrative” that truth can’t penetrate. Once it inconveniently emerged that Palestinian Islamic Jihad was the culprit, that the hospital was not actually hit, and that the death toll had been wildly exaggerated, the fact of the missile strike vanished from coverage; yet, the branding of Israel as war criminal endures — from Cairo and Amman to 10 Downing Street (which the Brits may soon have to rename Allahu Akbar Avenue, if there’s still any room to step around the prayer mats and change the street signs) to American universities (where Muslim Students Association chapters dominate the campus and the faculty lounge).

And then there’s Biden’s good friend “President” Abbas of the “Palestinian Authority.” This particular “president” is now in the 18th year of the four-year term he won in 2005, in no small part thanks to the Bush administration’s sociology project in sharia democracy. Abbas is holed up in Judea and Samaria (which we are supposed to call the West Bank) because the Palestinians kicked the “Palestinian Authority” out of Gaza in 2007 after they’d chosen Hamas in parliamentary elections the prior year.

Abbas, his Fatah party (the terrorist core of the PLO), and the so-called Palestinian Authority are the descendants of Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian Marxist who later decided he was a Palestinian Marxist. In this neck of the Levant, sharia supremacists have the popular edge over oozingly corrupt lefty nationalists, so the Muslim Brotherhood birthed Hamas in 1987 — just in time for the first intifada — in order to reimagine the struggle against “the occupation” as jihad rather than a “people’s revolution.” Both brands of fascism have a one-person-one-vote-one-time approach to “democracy.” In Hamas’s case, this approach is necessary to establishing a sharia state; in Abbas’s case, it is a result of the fact that if he allowed another election, Hamas would win.

It was thus sadly hilarious to hear President Biden explain that his conversation with “President” Abbas was meant to assure the “Palestinian people” that “the United States remains committed to [their] right to dignity and self-determination” — notwithstanding the October 7 atrocities against Israel that, incidentally, entailed the murders of more than 30 Americans, with another dozen or more likely taken hostage.

It would be unfair to hang such wishful Western ignorance on Biden alone. It’s exactly what American administrations of both parties have been saying for 30 years: There are these nice Palestinians who just want “self-determination” and the “dignity” of governing themselves democratically, but they keep being undermined by a handful of bad terrorists — about whom we really can’t do much, so we need to pretend that the problem is those pain-in-the-ass Jews who stubbornly insist on existing.

In point of fact, it is the Palestinians who make Hamas possible. Let’s say Israel completely dismantled Hamas tomorrow — which, by the way, it can’t do by a ground invasion of Gaza, since Hamas is run and funded from Qatar and armed and trained by Iran. You know what would happen then? The Muslim Brotherhood would have Hamas 2.0 up and running within days. Hamas is popular in the Palestinian territories precisely because it represents the sharia-supremacist objective of an Islamic state that extirpates Israel. Hamas may be the chief executor, but the objective is Palestinian.

“Self-determination”? “From the river to the sea” is not a Hamas battle cry. It is a Palestinian battle cry.

The vision of a map that does not include the word “Israel,” a map where a sharia regime is sovereign on every inch of land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, is Muslim Brotherhood doctrine. In the Palestinian territories, the Muslim Brotherhood runs the schools — and their component paramilitary camps for toddlers. Children are marinated from birth in Jew hatred. It’s not mere anti-Zionism, as the jihad’s transnational-progressive apologists try to maintain with a straight face — it’s Jew hatred.

Similarly, the students and radical faculty chanting “From the river to the sea” on American college campuses are not Hamas. They are the crescendo of a Muslim Brotherhood project, begun over 60 years ago, to plant and grow Muslim Students Association chapters in virtually every university in the United States and Canada. The enterprise was so successful that it has spawned an alphabet soup of Muslim activist organizations to which our government turned — in a manner as bipartisan as it was daft — when it felt the need to locate “moderates” after the spate of al-Qaeda attacks that culminated in 9/11. The antisemites are winning because the United States government and American popular culture somehow decided that “only” demanding the evisceration of Israel was tolerably moderate compared to the real crazies who piloted jumbo jets into skyscrapers (catalyzed, of course, by the same ideology that demands the evisceration of Israel).

If the Palestinians were at all interested in “self-determination” along the lines of Biden’s stubbornly delusional “two-state solution” — in which “Palestine” coexists peacefully with an Israeli neighbour — they would already have it. Gaza is the jihadist launchpad because Israel withdrew from every bit of it in 2005 — so the Palestinians could have self-determination . . . whereupon they self-determined that Hamas was what they wanted. Meantime, the Israelis would like nothing better than to wash their hands of the West Bank, too. But the dirty little not-so-secret is that there is no Palestinian vision of “self-determination” and “dignity” that would abide a Jewish state in the middle of what Palestinians insist is Allah’s turf.

This is not a Hamas thing. It’s a Palestinian thing.

Have you seen any Palestinian polling lately? There’s not a lot of it, since the West Bank and Gaza are not the easiest places from which to collect reliable data, but there is some. Here’s one from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. It tells us that, by a margin of 58 per cent to 20 per cent, Palestinians would prefer a renewal of the intifada (the “armed struggle”) to peaceful negotiations aimed at ending “the occupation.” That’s consistent with last year’s polling, as is the finding that about seven in ten Palestinians oppose the two-state solution.

Here’s some more: “President” Abbas must continue to resist having an election in the West Bank because, if one were held, he’d be thrashed by Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh, 58 per cent to 37 per cent. And that’s with Haniyeh holed up in his well-appointed Qatari headquarters, from which he and his subordinates joyously watched news reports of the October 7 barbarities in real time.

There is one candidate who would drub both Haniyeh and Abbas, though: Marwan Barghouti. He would beat Haniyeh 60 per cent to 37 per cent. Alas, this most popular Palestinian “politician” would have to conduct his campaign from an Israeli prison. An Arafat protégé who is beloved in both Fatah and Muslim Brotherhood circles because he was a leader of both the first and second intifadas, Barghouti is serving five life sentences for brutal murders.

How’s that for dignity?

Biden claimed that “Hamas does not represent the Palestinians,” who just want to live in peace while “Hamas’ stated purpose for existing is the destruction of the state of Israel and the murder of Jewish people.”

Dream on. Hamas was elected by Palestinians because it wants to destroy Israel and murder Jewish people. And if they couldn’t elect Hamas, Palestinians would elect Barghouti, who has proven extraordinarily adept at murdering Jewish people while seeking the destruction of the state of Israel.

But by all means, Mr. President, let’s give the Palestinians another $100 million to spread from the river to the sea.