Islamism’s assault on Israel is a crime against all of humanity

Israel, for almost a year, I am with you on the agonizing rollercoaster of despair and hope, hope and despair. I feel the crescendo of our briefest joy and I carry in my viscera the depths of our cavernous anguish

Just last week, 326 days after Hamas invaded Israel, pillaged, raped, and murdered 1,189 people – entire families, communities even unborn future generations in an act of ‘kinocide‘ (the weaponization of the destruction of families some consider a new crime against humanity), and abducted more than 250 hostages, Israel delivered a remarkable moment of joy.

Bedouin Israeli Muslim hostage Farhan al-Qadi was rescued by an 18-strong elite special forces IDF unit from the misery and barbarism of Hamas captivity, almost 10 months of it spent inside the subterranean dungeons of Hamas, some more than 230 feet below ground. In a tightly run operation, eyes shielded sunshine al-Qadi likely hadn’t seen for months, the IDF brought back the Bedouin to his astounded family and his elated nation.

Rescued hostage Qaid Farhan al-Qadi seen with family members and doctors at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba on August 27, 2024. (Courtesy Soroka Medical Center)

Days later Israel is once again plunged into a vortex of grief. The whiplash from despair to joy to grief is intolerable. Joyful celebrations that night in the Bedouin city of Rahat in the Negev are already a fading memory as Israel rallies around the enormity of grief and rage.

When Farhi addressed the Prime Minister as “Abu Yair,” the Bedouin’s plain words revived hope for coexistence between two peoples. Days later, Hamas brutally crushed even this meager joy as they executed, possibly within earshot of the IDF, six hostages abducted on October 7, one an American, each shot at close range.

The cruelty is unbearable. The cruelty is more than one nation, more than two peoples, more than humanity can bear.

This combination of six undated photos shows hostages, from top left, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Ori Danino, Eden Yerushalmi; from bottom left, Almog Sarusi, Alexander Lobanov, and Carmel Gat (The Hostages Families Forum via AP)

The six Israeli hostages were murdered some time Thursday night or Friday morning, two or three days after Farhi’s rescue – and possibly hours after the cabinet took a vote to hold a hard line on security measures along the Egyptian border. Many Israelis are linking these, particularly as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is reported to have explicitly said the vote would lead to hostage deaths. Others believe it may have been that IDF soldiers were closing in and the captors murdered the hostages before retreating. We may never have the full story unless the captors themselves are captured and questioned.

As a Muslim committed to Islam, and thus starkly opposed to the mendacious, totalitarian imposter of Islam that is Islamism, the underpinning of all Hamas’s words, deeds, and diabolical aspirations, I and countless other Muslims around the world who saw a humble Muslim Israeli rescued by the IDF only to witness this appalling execution of hostages at the last moment of rescue are reaffirmed in our mission to expose, disavow, reject and dismantle Islamism by all means possible. Even when Israel is bleeding and brokenhearted, you give us strength. You demand we be strong as you force us to confront the rank evil and ruthlessness of Hamas. 

Hamas held these hostages along with hundreds of others, all the while claiming to represent the Palestinian people who have themselves been captive above ground as part of Hamas’s calculated collateral damage strategy. It is a strategy wherein maximizing Palestinian deaths translates as political capital for Hamas’s totalitarian Islamist aims: the eradication of the Jewish people, the elimination of the Jewish State and, let’s not forget, as Hamas says in its own words, the eradication of as many Palestinian lives as called for by their own sick calculus.

Hamas’s is a dual genocide, of Israelis and of their Palestinian brethren.

I toured Israel’s Gaza border region in the days after October 7. I saw the sites of the atrocities, spoke, interviewed, and filmed eyewitness survivors of the appalling massacres, and bore witness examining the bodies of the murdered, remnants of those incinerated, and other human remains. 

Almost exactly a year on I will return to these places in mark of respect and commitment, just as Hamas’s war is not over, neither is mine on them.

Hamas’s war is the nihilist war waged by all Islamists. Embracing religionized war,  Hamas espouses an ideology that has raised killing above all sacraments. Its enmity is not merely about Israel, or Palestinians or territories, or even the Jewish people. It rejects all Western constructs, a universal value of which is that the Holocaust is a crime against humanity. Hamas deems this and other humanist values an intellectual invasion and cultivates a cosmic enmity with all Jews. All humanity — you and I — become mere collateral.

Islamism is not Islam. Islam demands that we as Muslims have sympathy for our fellow beings even if, mortals that we are, we might feel allegiance to our own. Many under such allegiance are legitimizing Hamas, deluded by the dehumanization of the Jewish people that Islamism indoctrinates. Far from a moral stance, tolerating Hamas or even going so far as to celebrate it as in some way “defenders” of the Palestinian ‘against’ the Israeli is, in fact, an immoral fallacy.

The Quran reminds us to “Contend not on behalf of the treacherous. Plead not on behalf of those who persist in being unfaithful. God loves not those who are perfidious.” Quran 4;106-108

Israel is part of humanity and is fighting Hamas on behalf of humanity. When Israel is bleeding and broken, a part of our humanity – my humanity – bleeds too. The recovery of al-Qadi is a resounding victory for all who stand against Islamism. The death of six hostages executed on the threshold of salvation is a horrific loss sustained not only by Israel but by all of humanity. As in the Torah so too in the Quran, the murder of one is the murder of all mankind. 

Hamas embodies Islamism’s dangerous creed of religionized antisemitism. Hamas’s acts embody its words, as it murders Jew after Jew while expending Palestinian lives to do so, its appetite for death boundless. A ruthless, malevolent, and unrelenting enemy of all humanity, there can be no accommodating Hamas. Nor can a peace be built with them. And, because humanity is me and you, Israel, your losses are made mine. Baruch Dyan Emet.