Martin Kramer: Islam: 1,400 years embattled
In September 1973, Egypt’s leaders were looking for a name for their plan to launch a surprise attack against Israeli forces across the Suez Canal. According to the Egyptian chief of staff, Saad El Shazly, they wanted “something more inspirational than our planning title, The High Minarets.” Once the assault was set for October 6, falling in Ramadan, “Operation Badr named itself.”Victor Davis Hanson: Gaza: Truths Behind All the Lies
This 17th of Ramadan marks 1,400 years since the battle of Badr (624), the first military confrontation between the Muslims and their opponents—in this case, the grandees of the Prophet Muhammad’s own tribe of Quraysh. He had fled their persecution in Mecca less than two years earlier (the hijra, 622), along with his followers, in order to regroup and recruit in Medina, to the north.
At Badr, southwest of Medina, Muhammad led a contingent of 313 Muslims, outnumbered three to one, to a decisive victory over the polytheists of Mecca. The Muslims killed many, took others prisoner for ransom, and secured much booty. Angels supposedly helped out. It’s considered a turning point in the fortunes of nascent Islam, demonstrating Muhammad’s skills as a commander as well as the divine favor enjoyed by the believers.
Badr received its most memorable cinematic treatment in the 1976 epic The Message, starring Anthony Quinn and bankrolled in good part by the then-dictator of Libya, Mu‘ammar Qadhafi (watch here). The movie roughly adhered to the traditional accounts of the battle: the preliminary duels by champions, the general melee, the cut-and-thrust, and the spirit of Muslim triumph. (Quinn didn’t play Muhammad, who couldn’t be depicted on film; he played Hamza, Muhammad’s companion and uncle. Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and later caliph, also couldn’t be depicted; the double-pointed sword on screen is wielded by him, but you won’t see him.)
Badr did much to signal the character of Islam going forward. Bernard Lewis, historian of Islam (and my mentor), summarized that character in theses words:
The founder of Christianity died on the cross, and his followers endured as a persecuted minority for centuries…. Muhammad did not die on the cross. As well as a Prophet, he was a soldier and a statesman, the head of a state and the founder of an empire, and his followers were sustained by a belief in the manifestation of divine approval through success and victory. Islam was associated with power from the very beginning, from the first formative years of the Prophet and his immediate successors.
Thus did Islam find its validation in military success, which became its hallmark for a millennium. Its first decisive victory occurred at Badr, during Ramadan of the second year of the hijra, corresponding to March 624.
“Occupied Gaza.” Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas cancelled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.Brendan O'Neill: The Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas
So Gaza has been occupied by Hamas, not Israel, for two decades.
“Collateral Damage.” Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.
Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.
“Disproportionate.” We are told Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.
The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. The American military in Iraq nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents. Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence—but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.
“Two-state solution.” Prior to October 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.
It was not Israel, but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.
Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in their multigenerational efforts to form their own “one-state solution.”
Lord Haw-Haw was the nickname given to William Joyce and others who broadcast Nazi propaganda in the UK during the Second World War. The Lord Haw-Haws of Hamas haven’t reached quite that level. They haven’t set up underground radio stations devoted to reading out loud every Hamas press release. But, consciously or otherwise, they do Hamas’s bidding. Spread its propaganda, hawk its lies. The activist class and much of the supposedly liberal media treat Hamas claims as good coin while being showily sceptical of everything Israel says. To such an extent that even the obvious fiction of organised rape on hospital wards was swiftly believed.
It happens over and over again. When al-Ahli Hospital was bombed last year, much of the media parroted the Hamas line that Israel did it. It later transpired that it might have been a misfired rocket from Islamic Jihad. When Hamas says more than ‘30,000 Palestinians’ have been killed, the media repeats it like a mantra. It doesn’t stop to ask not only whether the numbers are reliable, but also how many of the dead are Hamas terrorists. The idea that Israel has ‘murdered 30,000 Palestinians’ is a fiction, another war lie, essentially. The truth is that Israel is at war with Hamas, and thus it has slain many Hamas members, and in the process, as in every war in history, civilians have sadly died, too. It is rare indeed to hear such truths from the West’s Smart Set whose flapping hate for Israel has driven them into the arms of Hamas.
Some on the woke left have gone further than spewing the Hamas line – they’ve openly celebrated Hamas’s crimes. A ‘day of celebration’ is how one British left-winger described Hamas’s racist butchery of 7 October. A Cornell professor said he found Hamas’s pogrom ‘exhilarating’. A lecturer at the University of California, Irvine said Hamas’s attack had exposed ‘the Zionists’ for the ‘bloodthirsty animals that they are’. At George Washington University, ‘Glory to our martyrs’ was projected on to a wall. And there you had it: right-on campuses that spent the past two decades fearmongering about ‘rape culture’ were now cheering on mass rape.
This week’s fabricated story about rape at al-Shifa Hospital raises a chilling question: why are some quick to believe accusations of rape made by Palestinians and equally quick to discount and deny accusations of rape made by Israelis? Some of the same people who ate up the fake story about IDF rapists were dismissive of the far more substantiated reports about Hamas using rape as a weapon of war on 7 October. ‘If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see this on the footage’, they said in the aftermath of that racist pogrom. No one wants to hear this question, I know, but we have to ask it: why do they have to see a Jewish woman being raped before they’ll believe it happened?
‘Believe women’, many on the left said for years. They’ve changed their tune. Now it’s ‘Believe Palestinian women but not Israeli women’. Now it’s ‘Believe some women’. Now it’s ‘Believe it when Israelis are accused of rape but not when Israelis say they’ve suffered rape’. Actually, it’s worse. In lapping up Hamas’s claims, in embracing every horror story Hamas hawks about the Jewish State, the woke left has adopted a whole new rallying cry: ‘Believe fascists.’