“Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day… Allah willing, we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”
– Khaled Mashal, Hamas leader
“The vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace.”
– John Pilger, left-wing journalist and filmmaker
All sane observers understand that the official program of Hamas, if implemented, would result in an epoch-making bloodbath. One broadcast by Hamas activists announced: “My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews.”
But in the organs of the Israel-hating Left, we read that the Hamas election victory is “the best news from the Middle East for a long time” (The Guardian). We read that it is time “to reinforce Hamas resistance [to Zionist ideology]” and its “ethical cry to the world” (CounterPunch).
The goal of “reinforcing Hamas resistance” is quite widely shared in the anti-Zionist camp. Left-wing American activists in the International Solidarity Movement openly admit to collaborating with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the Israeli communist journal News From Within, Jennifer Loewenstein, who is currently ensconced in Oxford University, urges that “Hamas, its allies and solidarity activists abroad genuinely attempt to make a difference.” Editor Michel Warschawski anticipates that the Hamas regime will bring about “Palestinian unity in fighting the Occupation. It may provide new hopes and new confidence.” As these writers know very well, the “resistance” that is to be “reinforced” entails the calculated murder of small children, pregnant women, the elderly and the disabled; the bombing of buses, cafes and restaurants; and occasional attempts to demolish whole skyscrapers.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s Hizbullah is another jihadist faction much admired by today’s left-wing anti-Zionists. Claiming responsibility for massacres of Jewish civilians as far afield as South America, a Hizbullah statement pledged “an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.”
Yet Norman Finkelstein – author of The Holocaust Industry and other classics in the field of Jewish anti-Semitism – can hardly find the words to express his enthusiasm. “I truly honor [Hizbullah] for having inflicted an exceptional and deserving defeat on their foreign occupiers,” he once exclaimed. “It’s another wonderful chapter in the long and painful struggle for human emancipation and even liberty and certainly one that every human being can take inspiration from.”
During the recent war, Finkelstein echoed the sentiments of countless leftists who marched to the slogan: “We are all Hizbullah.”
In his visit to Lebanon earlier this year, Noam Chomsky justified Hizbullah’s military arsenal as a “deterrent to potential aggression.” Lebanese commentators were quick to express their disgust, warning that failure to disarm Hizbullah would lead to war – a prophesy that was fulfilled shortly afterward.
Was it in spite of this prospect, or because of it, that Chomsky allowed himself to be filmed greeting the terrorist commanders as long-lost friends? Could any parodist capture the scene of the taxpayer-financed American Jewish professor advising these murderers of Americans and Jews that instead of surrendering their weapons they should “inform the public and get them to understand your position” so that “they will put pressure on the politicians” to capitulate?
Writing in the London Review of Books, Charles Glass was impressed by Hizbullah’s ability to use rockets and suicide bombers “intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising political programme.” Critics promptly drew his attention to the words of Sheikh Nasrallah: “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
Such statements, replied Glass, “are in all likelihood fabrications.” Surely the “intelligent” masterminds of rocket barrages and suicide bombings could not possibly embrace such an “uncompromising political programme.” After all, the editors of the Lebanese Daily Starwere anxious to distance themselves from the journalist who had originally recorded Nasrallah’s outburst.
If true, that would be a shocking indictment of their own professional standards, given that in the space of a year they had published no fewer than 170 reports by the employee whose veracity they supposedly did not trust. But Glass would no more share this consideration with his readers than he would mention the anti-Semitic bloodlust of Al-Manar, or the Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb’s carefully documented conclusion that for Hizbullah, “the Israeli Jew becomes a legitimate target for extermination. And it also legitimizes attacks on non-Israeli Jews.”
Even so, Charles Glass can hardly compete with his more flamboyant radical colleagues in his enthusiasm for terrorists and suicide bombers. For the widely read columnist and documentary maker John Pilger – who ascribes Britain’s Middle East policy to the nefarious machinations of a single Jewish businessman – Hizbullah embodies “resistance to rapacious powerhumanity at its noblest.”
For the political firebrand George Galloway, Hizbullah terrorists are “martyrs and heroes,” while Sheikh Nasrallah’s “name rings in joy around the world.” The sickening list of leftist apologists for Nazi-style Jew-haters seems almost endless. While the jihadists of Hamas and Hizbullah dream of a second Holocaust, the ayatollahs of Iran are pur
