Perversion: South Africa Dragging Israel To ICJ Makes The Victim Of Hamas' Genocidal Instincts The Culprit

It is not clear what dubious motive drove the South African government to drag Israel to the International Court of Justice alleging a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, but no good is going to come of it.

This is because it wrongly reverses the gaze from Hamas’ horrendous 7 October terrorist attacks on Israel, targeting mainly civilians, many of whom remain Hamas’ hostages, and focuses instead on the civilian deaths resulting from Israel’s effort to defang and destroy a terrorist organisation.

The problem is with misuse of the word genocide itself. The UN Convention on genocide prevention adopted (in December 1948) a definition that says genocide is an attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part.

This definition cannot in any way apply to civilian deaths associated with Israel’s efforts to defend itself against an enemy (Hamas) which has actually promised genocide by threatening to rule from the river to the Sea (ie, finish off Jews in Israel and some of the occupied territories).

If collateral damage during a fierce war is treated as genocide, then every American military action in defence of “democracy” or against “terrorism” (from Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya to Serbia, Syria and Kosovo) can be termed genocide.

But nobody has yet taken Uncle Sam to the International Court of Justice claiming multiple attempts at genocide in these one-sided wars with huge civilian casualties.

What can truly be called genocide are the historically well-documented efforts of the European colonisers of North and South America and Australia to exterminate indigenous peoples, the more recent Hutu-Tutsi violence in Rwanda, and the systematic targeting of minority populations (especially Hindus) in our neighbourhood, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, not to speak of the ethnic cleansing of Pandits from Kashmir valley.

But the “democratic” Western world is loath to admit these facts, for it does not suit its geopolitical imperatives.

But more than any other people, if there is one religious group that truly faces a genocidal threat even today, it is the Jews of Israel. After facing the Nazi extermination camps, they now face another existential threat from the growing global wave of antisemitism (many Ivy League campuses have recently hosted such anti-Jewish demonstrations), not to speak of the military threats from Iran, Hamas, the Hezbollah and the Houthis of Yemen.

This Shia-Sunni alliance to exterminate Israel is as genocidal as any conflict can get. So one cannot but call out South Africa’s efforts to put the victim in the dock and play the nefarious game of the true aggressor.

The world should, in fact, focus on Islamism, which seems to be the ideological inheritor of Nazism, as the biggest single genocidal threat to peoples who are non-Muslim. Even as Nazism was eradicated after the Second World War, Islamism’s rise seems unchecked.

The core Nazi message was Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer — which means one people, one nation and one leader. How is this any different from the Islamist concept of One Umma, One Prophet, One Caliph, and One God?

Isn’t the Islamist binary, dividing the world of the Umma from the rest, essentially a subliminal call to genocide of non-believers?

In this article in Quilette, Sol Stern looks at the work of historian Jeffrey Herf, who has documented the parallels between Nazi thought and early Palestinian Islamism.

A University of Maryland professor, Herf, says Stern, found an “ideological symbiosis between Nazi Germany and the founding members of the Palestinian national movement…”. Nazi propaganda played a key role in bringing hatred of the Jews to the heart of Islamism and jihad in “present-day iterations in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank.”

Stern, quoting from Herf’s prodigious documentation of the Nazi-Islamist alliance during the Second World War, says that the Nazi propaganda initiative against Jews in the Arab world was led by Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini not only got a private audience with Adolf Hitler,  but also sent Palestinians to Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies.

After the war, Al-Husseini, whose association with Hitler should have made him a prosecution target for aiding and abetting the Jewish genocide, was briefly held in France, but was allowed to escape to Egypt, where delirious crowds welcomed him.

Stern reports that Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, “hailed the Mufti as a ‘hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle'.”

Two facts emerge from this. One, if Al-Husseini, who collaborated with the Nazis, can be a hero to many ordinary Muslims or at least the Islamists, the core ideologies of the two forms of totalitarianism cannot really be separated.

Two, if Islamism derives synergy from Nazism, how can Jews, the worst victims of Hitler’s genocidal mania, be held responsible for fighting Hamas to the finish, when Hamas’ main goal is the elimination of Israel? Which idea is truly genocidal?

For a deeper understanding of Herf’s work linking Nazism to Islamism, one should read the author’s 2009 work, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, but it is doubtful if the Arabs needed much prodding from Hitler to develop deep hatred for the Jews. In verse 5.51, the Quran asks Muslims to stay clear of the Jews. 

“O you who believe! Do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.”

There are other negative verses on Jews, but we shall not get into those details. Suffice it to say that hatred for Jews is hard-coded in Islam’s holiest text.

Coming back to the link between Nazism and Islamism, Herf reaches this conclusion:

“The Islamists benefited enormously from the support they received from Nazi Germany, which amplified their hatreds in print and on radio air waves. As with Nazism, there was and is no “moderate Islamism,” if by that one means a doctrine free of hatred of the Jews. Jew-hatred and the resulting wars against the Jewish state were and remain a part of Islamism’s essence.” (Note: I have taken this quote above from Stern’s article and not the original work of Herf as I don’t have access to it) 

I have sometimes linked Islamic totalitarian ideas to Nazism in the past, and Sol Stern’s article on Jeffrey Herf’s work provides more support for this thesis.

South Africa is making a huge mistake trying to put Israel in the dock instead of holding a mirror to the real genocidal ideas now being incubated in totalitarian Islamism.