Why do you think Genocide Joe – POTUS’s new nickname advocated by American Muslim champions of the Abandon Biden campaign ahead of the US election – rushed a Treasury under- secretary to Ankara to get President Erdogan to tone down his rhetoric about Hamas? One of this particular Gaza massacre’s many peculiar features is that the media onslaught isn’t quite as complete as all the other times.
And it’s taken thousands of dead Palestinian women and children to do this, but already some platforms echoing the desperate western need to support Israel’s “right to self defence” in response to Hamas’s “terrorism” are beginning to call the Jewish state’s response “disproportionate”.
That’s becoming a problem for Joe’s re-election campaign as Muslim voters call for a blanket boycott of the Democrats in swing states like Michigan. Biden barely clinched the state in 2020 by about 150,000 votes. And with 206,000 registered Muslim voters, Michigan could well become the difference maker next year, tossing the Democrats out and rubbishing Biden to the dustbin of history as a one-time has-been who tarnished his own legacy by helping Israel commit what senior UN official Craig Mokhiber called a case of “textbook genocide” in Gaza.
Yet Erdogan would have none of it. He continues to call Hamas “freedom fighters” and “holy warriors fighting for their land and people” and Israel the “terrorist” and Netanyahu the “butcher of Gaza” and “war criminal” who should be tried in The Hague and receive “just punishment”.
This was not just a diplomatic snub unheard of in seven-and-a-half decades of American “blank cheque support” to Israel, but also the first government level recognition of Hamas’s credentials.
To understand its “throw the Jews into the sea” rhetoric, you have to first understand the nature of the Israeli occupation; a one of its kind takeover of a people and their homes in the long, troubled history of the “holy land”.
This wasn’t a country or an army taking over a sovereign territory, but a superpower of the time – the UK – legitimising Zionist nonsense about “a land without a people for a people without a land”, erasing its own guilt about anti-Jewish pogroms and six million souls gutted in the holocaust, and simply deciding to install Europe’s Jews in their fabled biblical homeland.
And if that meant going back on His Majesty’s word to Sharif Hussein of Makkah, whose help was pivotal in the Arab revolt that ended four centuries of Ottoman rule in Palestine and placed it in Britain’s lap, and removing locals from their homes to hand over the keys to the “returning” Jews, then all that was needed was a narrative painting the evicted Muslims as aggressors and occupying Jews as victims exercising their “right to self-defence”.
And, for the record, it was the triumphant Jews that first shouted “throw the Muslims into the sea” as they expanded their illegal settlements on stolen land and entrenched themselves in their “rightful home between the river and the sea”.
Decades later, when Hamas reluctantly participated in the 2006 election, forced upon the Palestinians as part of George W Bush’s crusade of spreading “democracy and civilisation” in the Arab world – minus its allies, of course – it’s clear, unambiguous call for freeing the land of the invaders invoked strong passions among local voters.
It swept the election, declared “free, fair and transparent” by EU and UN observers and former US president Jimmy Carter. Yet when Israel, US and EU promptly dismissed the result and slapped painful sanctions on Gaza, it was the defeated Palestinian Authority, reviled by people as a corrupt Israeli stooge, that unleashed the first armed post-election attack on Gazans for supporting Hamas.
The civil war that followed insulted half a century of blood and tears and shattered the hopes of millions of Muslims who viewed refugees from the Naqba (catastrophe) and the Six Day War as the conscience of the Arab World.
Since then the Israel has always decided who and what goes in and out of Gaza, always keeping essential items like fuel and medicines in short supply, making Gaza “the world’s largest open air prison”, the world’s most densely populated 25-by-7 mile stretch of land, a place with 70pc unemployment, poverty and constant, unending suffering.
Israel also periodically “mows the lawn”, its own shameless description for air raids that regularly kill hundreds, if not thousands, Palestinian civilians.
Muslim countries ought to be ashamed that Erdogan is the only head of state to publicly denounce the “terrorist” label imposed on Hamas. He understands, and dares to remind the world, that Hamas will continue to find support at the grassroot across the occupied territories so long as the occupation remains, no matter how mercilessly Israel conducts its “textbook genocide” or how shamelessly the world’s most “liberal countries” support, fund and arm it.
Erdogan’s warning, that Israel’s brutal tactics will take the effects of this war to other countries, would have sent a chill down Biden’s spine as American Muslims begin to mobilise to put the last nail in the coffin of his politics.
Far from “removing Hamas from the face of the earth”, as Netanyahu has promised, the Oct 7 incursion into Israel has unleashed a cataclysm of events that is far more likely to change forever the way the world views and supports Israel.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023