The viral Jihad and its willing helpers
A picture is circulating around the world. It shows five-year-old Osama al-Rakab. A pitiful little boy, skin and bones. Osama is the supposed poster child for the famine in Gaza. His image has prompted international media outlets to run headlines such as “This is what hunger looks like.” The truth is: this is what the most famous victim of Hamas’ viral jihad looks like. Osama is cannon fodder in the obsessive attempt to pin starvation on Israel as a weapon of war. Except that Israel’s war against Hamas has nothing to do with Osama’s medical condition. He suffers from a genetic disease, for which he is was treated in Italy with Israel’s help. Many of these “hunger images” disseminated by international media show malnourished toddlers next to well-fed mothers with double chins. But that doesn’t necessarily prompt journalists to question Hamas propaganda. There are so many untruths that could be exposed as such with a few curious search clicks. The fact that this image battle radicalizes young people in Athens or Berlin to the point of attacking Jewish students or Israeli tourists does not seem to be reason enough to interrupt the silent support of this viral Jihad.
“We are at war,” said Osama bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri as early as in 2004, “and more than half of this war is being fought on the battlefield of the media. And we are in an information war for the hearts and minds of our umma.” Two decades ago, Al Qaeda understood what many Western governments still refuse to understand today: physical terror against the West is only a sideshow. Al Qaeda was the pioneer in the shift from physical violence to terror in cyberspace. From recruitment and bomb-making instructions to propaganda, it skillfully subjected masses of young people in Western countries, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to Islamist brainwashing.
What Al-Qaeda perfected on the internet, ISIS continued on social media. During the time of the “caliphate” in Iraq, ISIS had up to 70,000 Twitter accounts, which perfected the art of ruthlessly abusing democratic freedoms for terrorist propaganda. With fatal consequences. Although security agencies and political decision-makers in Western countries have long been aware that traditional and social media are an integral part of Jihad against the West, even the US still lacks a strategy against the “continuation of terror by other means.”
The fact that Hamas resembles Al-Qaeda and ISIS not only ideologically, but even surpasses them in cruelty and brutality, is known since October 7, at the latest. The terrorists filmed the massacres of women and children with body cams. Families had to watch live on Telegram as their children were kidnapped and their women raped and mutilated. Terabytes of this brutality were shared with the entire world. Among the harbingers of Hamas-Islamist fanaticism in our time are countless suicide bombings in Tel Aviv cafés and Jerusalem buses, as well as the cruel murder of the five-member Fogel family in 2011. The Palestinian terrorist slit the throat of the three-month-old baby, as well as those of his parents and siblings. But what happens in Israel stays in Israel.
For Hamas has one advantage over other jihadist organizations: they learned from the best. The Muslim Brotherhood, the founding ideologues of Hamas, were directly at the source in the 1930s through their ally, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. He imported Hitler’s Nazi propaganda to Palestine and blended the Nazis’ eliminatory struggle with his own Jihadist fantasy. Hamas masters the art of manipulation like no other terrorist group. It floods social media with propaganda and incites entire armies of young people from Paris to London to Berlin to cheer on mass murder. Unlike ISIS and Al-Qaeda, Hamas also draws the usual suspects—aid organizations, UN agencies, and journalists—into its orbit. Statistics on deaths and starvation come from the Hamas-led Ministry of Health and are accepted at face value.
This becomes more and more visible in Germany, Israel’s closest ally after the US and beacon of hope in Europe. Public broadcasters in Germany repeat Hamas information unchecked on a daily basis. They create a dangerous precedent: a Jihadist terrorist organization becomes a legitimate actor. With the viral Jihad’s willing helpers, Hamas is experiencing a political upgrade. Germany’s ARD and ZDF report daily on starving Palestinian children. They repeatedly conceal the misery and torment of the Israeli hostages. They conceal the context. They conceal Hamas’s unscrupulous exploitation of Palestinian civilians.
No one in Israel wants even a single Palestinian child to suffer. But it will not continue to sacrifice its own children by allowing Hamas’s reign of terror in the Gaza Strip. I wish that the Israeli hostages, who have been starved and tortured for almost two years, had provoked even a third of the outrage that the avalanche of Hamas propaganda about starving Palestinians has provoked. The images of murdered, tortured, and kidnapped Israeli children and women did not become part of Israel’s war effort. Because Israel, as a free, democratic state, protects the families of the victims and their dignity.
The German government calls Israel’s “actions in Gaza unacceptable.” Too often, not a word is said about Hamas’ theft of aid supplies. Too often, not even half a sentence about the Israeli hostages who have been starved and tortured for almost two years. That is unacceptable. And it is influenced by the reporting of public broadcasters, according to whispered comments from government circles. The reporting, in turn, is the result of UN reports, which are largely fed by Hamas information. These reports conceal the hard-to-miss hundreds of tons of aid waiting to be distributed by the UN. These reports conceal the fact that Israel’s COGAT unit is in constant communication with the UN to find solutions to logistical bottlenecks. Of course, these reports do not mention that Hamas has skimmed off a large portion of the aid supplies over the past year and a half, selling them at exorbitant prices on the black market and thus financing its own terror. Until Israel, together with the US, established an alternative distribution mechanism. Nor do these UN reports mention that the last Israeli hostages who were freed looked like Holocaust survivors, starved and dehumanized. They also fail to mention that this horrific war could be ended in minutes—the moment Hamas frees the hostages and lays down its weapons.
Hamas’s strategy is working. Many international media are surprisingly willing to accept terrorist propaganda. This shapes public opinion, which in turn influences the government’s political stance. Hamas feels vindicated and sabotages the ceasefire negotiations in Gaza. At the expense of the hostages. And at the expense of Palestinian civilians. Pro-Palestinian left-wing, extremist and jihadist movements in European capitals, in turn, are growing and thriving. With devastating consequences for these countries’ democracy and security. Anyone who cheers Hamas in the lecture hall and celebrates burned Jewish babies on the streets, identifies with terrorism. Europe is already feeling the consequences. In Germany alone, attacks in Berlin, Solingen, Mannheim, and Munich in recent months were just the beginning.
A German version of this article was previously published in Germany’s WELT newspaper.
