Genocide of Jews: the declared goal of Hamas

 Ironies, paradoxes and hypocrisy abound in politics and war. At the recent pro-Hamas anti-Israel demonstrations around the world the charge is often made that Israel is perpetrating genocide against Palestinian Arabs [for the demo in Washington, DC, see here]. And this charge is not new as shown by a poster in the US Library of Congress collection.

Ironically, or perhaps as one would expect, the Hamas Charter eagerly looks forward to genocide of the Jews, cast in Islamic terms to be sure. We read in Article 7 [seven] of the Hamas Charter, the following:

... the Prophet of Allah (saas) says: The Last Hour would not come until the Muslims fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, and until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say. Muslim or Servant of Allah there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree of Gharqad would not say it, for it is the tree of the Jews (Bukhari and Muslim).3 [this passage is quoted from the translation published by the University of California Press on behalf of the so-called Institute of Palestine Studies]. 

The translation of Prof Raphael Israeli of the Truman Institute for Peace of the Hebrew University has this passage as follows:

The time [= Judgement Day] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: 0 Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad(17), which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim 18)

[Bukhari and Muslim were medieval compilers of collections of Islamis hadiths]

Prof Israeli points out that "the Egyptian troops who launched the assault on

the Bar-Lev Line in October 1973, were equipped with "booklets of guidance" which included, inter alia, this same quotation."

This passage is preceded in the Charter by this line:

"Hamas is one of the links in the Chain of Jihad in the confrontation with the Zionist invasion"

The translation of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs is as follows:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem [O Slave of Allah- unexplicably omitted in this translation], there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him." (Article 7)

Ironic is it not that those who accuse Israel of genocide against Palestinian Arabs, not only practice it against Jews, as on October 7, but openly declare that as their goal? Now translations of the Hamas charter have been available for many years but it seems that the general public is unaware of what it says about murdering Jews. The press, the media and the academic world, and the Western foreign ministries pretend not to know of it. Otherwise, could Emanuel Macron, president of France, have distorted what was happening on the ground in the battle of Gaza as he did?