By Seth Mandel
Monday, June 03,
2024
Hamas is known for many things, but ambiguity isn’t one
of them. So why is anyone still trying to argue over the terror group’s
intentions? Certainly Hamas isn’t muddying the waters.
At a debate over the Israel-Hamas war in early May,
former Bernie Sanders press secretary and current star Hamas surrogate Briahna
Joy Gray made the following assertion: “When Hamas is talking about eliminating
Israel, it’s not talking about killing all of the Jews, it’s talking about
eliminating… an ethnonationalist state and having a state more like what we
have in America.”
To this, Commentary
contributing editor Eli Lake, who was also on the debate stage, gave the only
truly appropriate response: he laughed his face off.
Stung by the relentless criticism on social media that
followed, which heated up over the past weekend, Gray made a curious choice:
she called in the Hamas Covenant, the group’s charter, to her defense. In 2017,
Hamas “revised” its charter to sound slightly less Nazi-ish. Declaring Lake
ignorant and mean, Gray triumphantly posted an excerpt from a Wikipedia summary
of the revised Hamas charter. The new document replaces “Jews” with “Zionists”
throughout. So there.
Here Gray makes a mistake that is easily avoidable if you
bothered to read more than a Wikipedia summary of the Hamas charter.
And the reason has as much to do with Hamas’s laziness as its barbarism.
In one episode of The Office, Michael Scott
writes a spy novel and uses his deputy Dwight as the stand-in for a very dumb,
annoying character, then has the Word document replace all instances of
“Dwight” with “Samuel,” just in case Dwight ever sees the script. Dwight
figures out the insulting truth when he sees that Michael misspelled his name
once as Dwigt, and it therefore wasn’t caught by the search-and-replace
function.
Hamas’s revised Covenant follows a similar sort of
blockheaded blunder. The original version freely used “Jews” as the enemy. The
document itself could therefore not be defended, and the same was true of the
terrorist group. But Hamas wanted the support of the “antiracist” social
justice brigades on campus, so it clarified its founding document to say that
the group’s problem wasn’t with Jews but with Zionists.
This may sound silly, but it was enough for the
progressive activists of the world to shed their hesitation toward joining
forces with a theocratic death cult. But the problem for Gray and the rest of
the legion of Hamas fans is that Hamas didn’t remove all versions
of the word “Jew” from the document. Obviously, even if it had, this would be a
ridiculous leg to stand on—Palestinian Arabs during the British Mandate opposed
Jewish immigration, full stop, both before and after the Balfour Declaration raised
the possibility of a state. But Hamas left its original intent in the new
document anyway.
In its section on Jerusalem, the charter states: “The
measures undertaken by the occupiers in Jerusalem, such as Judaization,
settlement building, and establishing facts on the ground are fundamentally
null and void.” The “Judaization” of Jerusalem is a common talking point among
virulent anti-Semites and it very famously means: Jews living in Jerusalem.
How about the al-Aqsa mosque, what Palestinians call the
mosque built on the holiest Jewish site in the world? “The occupation’s plots,
measures and attempts to judaize (sic) Al-Aqsa and divide it are null, void and
illegitimate.”
Perhaps if the group had remembered to write “Zionize”
instead of “Judaize” it could have saved its Western useful idiots some
embarrassment.
And of course, the charter also insists that “Whatever
has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building,
Judaization or changes to its features or falsification of facts is
illegitimate.”
So: Hamas’s problem, stated clearly and repeatedly in its
charter, is the presence of Jews living anywhere in “the land of Palestine.”
Now, there is a bit of disagreement online about whether
apologists like Briahna Joy Gray already know this and are merely pretending
that Hamas’s beef is with some kind of governmental institutional
representation. But practically speaking, it doesn’t really matter. Because the
fact of the matter is that crossing out “Jews” and writing “Zionists” is
actually an admission that there is no such concept as anti-Zionism except as a
flavor of anti-Semitism. It is Hamas saying, explicitly, when we say
“Zionist” we mean “Jew.” And even Briahna Joy Gray knows that.
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