Saturday, October 14, 2023

The Late, Great Hamas Finally Got its Wish - Victor Davis Hanson

 

​ by Victor Davis Hanson

Dreaming of their own version of the Holocaust.

 


Ever since Hamas was “elected” to run Gaza and then followed the usual “one election/one time” Middle East formula, it has bragged nonstop that its agenda is to erase Israel off the face of the earth (cf. the wall map in the office of our Rep. Rashida Tlaib).

Its unabashed nihilist boasts resonated throughout the Palestinian “movement.” Its fiery threats delighted the Arab street.

Indeed, Hamas was soon celebrated as the most “authentic” of the radical Palestinian terrorist movements.

Which cadre of thugs could top its end-of-days rhetoric, its assured and steady supply of money and weapons from Iran, its satanic eagerness to mutilate and dismember, and the sanctuary and financial wherewithal offered to it by our “ally” Qatar?

None.

Since Hamas was viewed as the most “volatile” and creepy of the Palestinian factions, and the most useful to Iran, the Obama and Biden administrations appeased the murderers. Was it not part of their hare-brained grand strategy of empowering theocratic Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas hirelings?

Their campaign (remember the “they literally know nothing” media and the Obama “echo chamber” created by a boastful Ben Rhodes?) was to forge these disparate Islamists into a crescent of resistance to Israel and any “moderate” Arab regime (recall the Obama-Biden transitory hatred of the Gulf sheikdoms).

The result would be “creative tension”—as well as payback for the Israeli election of Netanyahu.

Through this formula, Obama believed he could always pressure Israel to grant concessions to radical Palestinians thanks to the looming threat of an ever-menacing (and soon-to-be nuclear) Iran with help from Obama’s other friends—the then-Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and Obama’s pal the neo-Ottomanist and antisemite Erdogan of Turkey, Obama’s self-described personal liaison to the Islamic world.

Yes, this was sheer madness—if perhaps characteristic of Obama’s well-known orneriness.

Perhaps someday soon, a few disinterested historians might even record that the current nightmare in Israel is the logical end result of what Barack Obama, John Kerry (remember his Trump-era Paris reconnaissance with the Iranians?), Ben Rhodes, Valerie Jarrett, Robert Malley, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and a host of other incompetent but otherwise haughty and dangerous people once conjured up.

A defiant and empowered murderous Hamas was one of the many dividends of their appeasement and grand Middle East schemes—given the eagerness of the Obama and Biden administrations to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza despite warnings from their own experts that such cash would enhance terrorism and abet the evil work of Hamas with an American financial stamp of legitimacy.

Hence, a soon-to-be nuclear Iran, freed from sanctions, had enough money (remember the nocturnal cash pallets on the Tehran tarmac?) to fund its surrogate global death squads.

Hamas has killed Jewish civilians for nearly two decades, always escaping the full wrath of Israel’s retaliation by appealing to the amoral consciousness of left-wing European and American governments. It counted on ample help from both Iran and Arab regimes, along with Turkey, which always screams “instability” at the first sign of Israeli retaliation.

The blustering Hamas has now murdered over 1,000 Jews in their homes, preferring especially to gun down children, reportedly behead babies, torture the doomed, rape the helpless, execute the elderly and brutalize women—topping the killing off in good SS fashion by gleeful dismemberment and desecration of Jewish corpses.

So, they finally got their wish for their own version of the Holocaust, for what they had always bragged would be the “final” Israel-ending war—as their cowardly elders announced last Saturday from their protected enclaves.

Yes, Hamas promised their mass killing of innocents would ignite the Muslim world, and incite simultaneous attacks on Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and perhaps Egypt—all as their planned anniversary replay of the 1973 Yom Kippur War’s first 48 hours.

And it may—or may not.

The ebullient people of Gaza seemed initially enthralled at videos of mutilated Jews and showed their zeal by spitting on hostages carried back home for supposed Roman-like triumphs before their public sacrifices. Videos of the gruesome killings of Jews were hot downloads on Gaza mobile phones.

Now mutilating dead Israelis, now boasting how brave their sons were in slaying unarmed Jews inside Israel, Gazans assumed a shocked Israel would capitulate.

Would not its megaphones in the West characteristically protect them and restrain Israel?

Could not they themselves always ensure a few thousand of their own civilians be sacrificed as expendable human shields of their missile pads, and thus become necessary fuel for their boilerplate accusations of “war crimes” that usually curtail Israeli retribution?

But now the Israeli retaliation seems oblivious to all that.

It may not be like the past incursions into Gaza that were manipulated by a cowardly Hamas to gain media sympathy for “collateral damage” that they themselves engineered.


Victor Davis Hanson

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-late-great-hamas-finally-got-its-wish/

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