While Old Joe Biden’s handlers hunt for “white supremacist terrorists,” the actual terrorists of the Islamic State (ISIS) have been regrouping and growing more assertive. ISIS has just released a new issue of Al-Naba, its weekly newsletter, containing a feature article forthrightly entitled “Kill the Jews,” and issuing a call for global war between Muslims and Jews and their allies. For seven decades now, Western policymakers have steadfastly ignored the role that Islam plays in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but ISIS’ bloodthirsty new call is a fresh reminder that to continue to pretend that the clash has nothing to do with religion is both naïve and dangerous.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported Sunday that the ISIS article refers to the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, to support its denigration of the Jews. The ISIS editors wrote: “Allah revealed the qualities of the unbelieving Jews,” that is, Jews that remain Jews and do not convert to Islam, “in many verses in his wise book, and He described them in detail and precision. There is no doubt about the wisdom of this precise, divine description, so it should serve as a lesson and warning for you to take caution and to be prepared. A Muslim shuns the conduct of the Jews, the adherents of their customs, and their aides, and he takes heed of their deception; out of necessity, he prepares to wage war against them.”
Indeed, all this is abundantly supported in the Muslim holy book, which states that the Jews are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82), are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and that Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony (9:29).
The ISIS article, according to MEMRI, also states that in the Qur’an, Allah revealed numerous negative qualities of the Jews, including their “unbelief and polytheism”; their “distortion and corruption of Allah’s word”; their “suppression of the truth”; their “betrayal of the covenants and killing of the prophets”; their “severe hostility toward the believers”; their “curse and heartlessness”; their “cowardice in battle”; their “practice of usury and robbery”; their “continued striving for corruption and chaos”; their “acceptance of wrongdoing”; their “lust for [earthly] life”; their “arrogance and pretension”; and their “jealousy and malice toward Muslims.”
In light of all this, ISIS explains that the struggle against Israel is eschatological, not political, although it acknowledges that analysts have generally missed this: “Most people have disregarded the Quranic characterization of the Jews and its aim. They have instead concerned themselves with a historical narrative of events, thereby deviating from the roots of the conflict.” These mistaken analysts, says ISIS, think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arose over “lands and possessions.” It asks: “Is there any pretext left on which someone can claim that the war with the Jews is not religious?”
This is not solely ISIS’ idea. In fact, many Muslim clerics have been saying it for years. According to The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, Egyptian imam Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub made the same point back in 2009 when he said: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels—not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: ‘The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.’ [Qur’an 9:30] It is Allah who said that they are infidels.”
Another Muslim cleric, Sheikh Said Al-Afani, contradicted the accepted wisdom in the West when he said: “Our hatred of them is purely on religious grounds, and not because of the pure, sacred land, which was blessed by Allah, or because of Gaza…not only because of Al-Aqsa and so on. We hate them, first and foremost, because of their enmity towards Allah, and because they slayed our prophets.”
Related: The Biden Administration Takes Aim at Israel
Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’ deputy minister of religious endowments, on Al-Aqsa TV on Feb. 28, 2010, condemned on Islamic grounds anyone who wants to negotiate with the Israelis: “I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values.”
ISIS’ article contains a chilling exhortation that arises directly from all this dehumanization: “We incite Muslims everywhere to fight the Jews and target them in their neighborhoods and synagogues that are spread across Europe and elsewhere. Kill the Jews by any means, constrict them, and [be part of] the start of the war that burns the unbelieving Jews.” Western policymakers should study this article, and carefully ponder its implications before they make still more catastrophic blunders to prolong this conflict. But they won’t.
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