Posted on 06/11/2024 10:54:39 AM PDT by SJackson
Hamas are the civilians.
Americans expected Osama bin Laden to be found in a cave in Afghanistan. In reality, he was living comfortably in a military town in Pakistan under the protection of local authorities. Similarly, Israeli hostages, including the four who were last rescued, have come home telling stories of being kept captive in ‘civilian’ households.
In both cases we fundamentally misunderstood what Islamic terrorism is. It’s not a “fringe group of extremists”, as politicians and the media describe it, but an ethnic and religious movement. The religious values of Islamic terrorists are universally shared by the vast majority of Muslims, while the ethnic ones ground Islamic warfare in the interests of specific clans and families.
Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and has a widespread base of support across the Muslim world which is dotted with branches of the Brotherhood, but its ethnic power base is also grounded in the key clans and families that control Gaza. That is why Hamas still retains the support of the majority of the Muslim colonists currently occupying Gaza. It’s also why those same ‘civilians’ held Israeli hostages prisoner and could be trusted not to inform on them.
The latest Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll shows that 71% of Gazans support the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7 and 56% expect Hamas to win the war. 62% in Gaza are happy with the performance of Hamas during the war and 59% want Hamas to stay in power.
That’s because they are Hamas and the terror group is also them.
The ‘Palestinian’ myth is that the Muslim colonists occupying parts of Israel are the ‘indigenous’ people. The reality is that they were Arab settlers who arrived with and after the Islamic conquest of Israel. Some, like the notorious Husayini clan, which produced Hitler’s Mufti, were relatively recent arrivals. The most powerful and wealthiest of these large families took control of urban areas, as the Husayinis tried to do in Jerusalem, and became a vital part of the Ottoman feudal order serving as mayors and muftis. When the Ottomans were defeated, the clans fought to reclaim their power with movements like the Muslim Brotherhood also known as Hamas.
Hamas is an ideological Islamist movement, but its control over Gaza depends on these large families. That’s why the idea that most people have that Hamas is a fanatical movement that exists apart from ordinary people and can be fought and defeated apart from them is wrong.
That’s also why so few of the hostages have been rescued. Like the last four, the hostages were largely dispersed among ‘civilian’ clan families across neighborhoods controlled by them. These families are formally civilian households, but many of their members are affiliated with Hamas. Rather than being an army whose members belong foremost to Hamas, they are more like the mafia and belong foremost to their extended clan, and choose to lend their support to Hamas.
It’s not just that Hamas uses human shields, which it certainly does, it’s that its infrastructure depends on clans whose adults provide fighters and whose women and children act as human shields for the greater glory of the clan and for Islam. The same clans that will kill teenage girls for violating family honor will also serve up even younger children as human shields for honor.
There is no way for Israel to rescue its hostages without going into dense neighborhoods under the control of the clans to get them out. And that will lead to firefights and ‘Black Hawk Down’ moments. Clan members, who never identify themselves as such, will cry that they were massacred. And foreign leaders and the media will condemn the deaths of ‘civilians’.
Defeating Hamas without civilian casualties is impossible because the Islamic terrorist group not only operates among civilians, but is rooted in the society of Gaza. The clans that run Gaza, that provide the manpower that controls UNRWA institutions, and that are the mainstays of Hamas are also the large families that dominate the businesses, cultural and religious life in Gaza.
There’s no meaningful distinction between civilians and Hamas. Some clans reject Hamas authority and Israel has tried to solicit some of them to run Gaza. For now with few results. The United States strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq had similarly depended on swaying certain clans, elders and warlords into abandoning Al Qaeda or the Taliban with very temporary success.
Eventually the Taliban or Al Qaeda, rebranded as ISIS, returned. And some of the same men we had armed and trained, turned their guns on us. That is an almost inevitable outcome in Counterinsurgency or COIN. When bringing democracy to the Muslim world fails, Westerners begin competing with Jihadists for the support of the clans only to be stabbed in the back.
The Jihadists have the Koran on their side. To Muslims, their terrorism will always be more righteous than our fumbling efforts to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage. Appealing to moderates or promising a better life will not win their support. On the contrary, it only infuriates the Imams in their mosques and the influential clan leaders into opposing us.
Instead we must reckon with the reality that there are few civilians in Gaza or in the Muslim world. And those who legitimately are civilians should be measured by their deeds, not their clothing. In a culture where terrorists in the field don’t wear uniforms, where large families have sizable stocks of weapons and children are taught to kill and die, the externals don’t matter.
There are no civilians in Gaza. The vast majority of the population supports Hamas or some Islamic terrorist movement. Only a tiny minority opposes Islamic terrorism and wants peace.
The distinction is not between soldiers, terrorists and civilians, but enemies and non-combatants. Israel and Western nations should stop thinking about civilians, a concept that does not apply in a battlespace where terrorists wear street clothes and entire neighborhoods are controlled by clans that hide hostages in plain sight, and think about enemies and neutrals.
An enemy is anyone, regardless of clothing or sex, who is aligned with Islamic terrorists.
Every poll continues to show that the vast majority of those in Gaza are aligned with the enemy. And if that were not the case, the war would have long since ended once locals informed the authorities of where the hostages are and where the remaining Hamas terrorists are set up.
Israel is not just at war with an organization, but with an enemy culture. As is most of the world whether it chooses to admit it or not. The war is not defined by what they wear, but what they think. As long as human shields, female suicide bombers and child soldiers abound, the war cannot be fought by treating civilians as noncombatants while hunting elusive terrorists.
The only way to defeat an enemy is to fight him as he is, not as we would like him to be.
It would be a far cleaner and neater war if Islamic terrorists fought like conventional armies. They do not. And it is time to fight them on their own terms instead.
Hamas can’t be defeated by waiting until its terrorists take off their civilian clothes and put on uniforms. Hamas are the civilians. They are the ones holding the hostages. The only way to free the hostages and defeat the terrorists is to destroy the terror culture in whatever form it takes.
ping
As Joe would say, “Not a joke!”
Well, Rome showed the world what is necessary to destroy a culture….visit Carthage
There are over two million members of Hamass in Gaza. How do you stop thay?
Yeah just like those “Good Germans” at the end of WWII.
Is also saying "Let's send them to the United States."
Interesting book on that topic, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 Interviews in the early 50s with ten non distinctive Germans who were members of the Nazi Party. Reminiscent of Marge Schott's comment, Everything you read, when he came in he was good. They built tremendous highways and got all the factories going. He went nuts, he went berserk. I think his own generals tried to kill him, didn’t they? Everybody knows he was good at the beginning, but he just went too far.
My guess most of Gaza feels the same way. If this ends badly for them, Hamas just went a little too far.
Sobering analysis you simply will never, ever find in the mainstream media. When the truth conflicts with The Narrative - they’ll report the Narrative.
Dan’s use of two words together says it all - Islamic terrorists. No one can separate one from the other. This means that Islam teaches barbaric brutality on all humanity. Though Islamists have a preference to brutalize kafirs or infidels at will, they will also brutalize each other without logical or sane explanation - witness killing of their own children for transgressions. If this stark realization does not sink in to the civilized world, we will return to the Dark Ages.
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So we all become baby killers, deliberately and cheerfully? That cure is worse than the disease.
Just a question. How many "babies" did we kill in Tokyo, Dresden, Cologne, Nagasaki, Hiroshima....?
Respectfully, you might consider reading a little history. Do you think any "kids" were killed in the American Civil war? How about 9 year olds, 10 year olds? From combat, disease, starvation? you know... from war.
“Historians estimate that anywhere between 250,000 and 420,000 boy soldiers, many in early their teens or even younger served in the armies of the Union and the Confederacy between 1861 - 1865... Some 15 percent were seriously wounded or died from battle wounds, diarrhea, infections or malnutrition.” Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War
War is violence without "rules". The only rules are made by the victorious and those with no understanding about the very nature of war or armed conflict.
You do realize that CIVILIANS make up the majority of all casualties in ANY WAR.
Do you think our "precision" guided weapons avoided children or turning entire families into goo and splatter? That video of the IDF going in and freeing hostages was missing the part about the explosives used to "confuse" the Hamas combatants.
I am a little suprised that people don't read about what war is really all about. My grandfather, 8 uncles, father, cousins and son are/were in the armed forces or fought in a revolution/insurgency.
War is horrible but it's better than watching your family laying on the front lawn with slit throats, raped, or splattered across the street. and yeah..... sometimes you got to get your hands dirty and that most soldiers/marines that have been "in war" know that and don't usually brag about stuff they did, other than their job or the bravery they witnessed.
It's a small point, but the Allies didn't bomb Cologne indiscriminately (even as we pounded the bridge and the train station to no end).
The cathedral was recognized as enough of a treasure to preserve it. (Considering its proximity to the bridge and train station, that was no easy feat.)
https://nypost.com/2023/10/14/progressives-call-for-us-to-take-refugees-from-gaza/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-policy/2985895/biden-administration-contemplating-bringing-palestinian-refugees-us/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-west-should-welcome-gaza-refugees-asylum-seekers-hamas-terrorism-displacement-5d2b5890
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-14/ty-article/israeli-mks-publish-plan-to-transfer-gazans-to-europe-to-alleviate-humanitarian-crisis/0000018b-ce7c-d168-a3ef-dffeed320000
The same people are called "terrorists" or "refugees" depending on who is going to push them where.
Welcome to Reality. Fascinating isn’t it?
Good article. Interesting discussion.
The clan, mob, collective, gang, whatever, TOTALITARIANS have one thing in common: A Singleness of Purpose.
“Jehad is a continuous and never ending struggle waged on all fronts including political, economic, social, psychological, domestic, [foreign], moral and spiritual to attain the objectives of policy”
The Quranic Concept of War pp 115/16
Their own words tell us their intent. The deeds are the reality of their words. The words have spread around the earth. The horrific, incomprehensible deeds are carried out every day somewhere on the planet.
The never-ending war on truth, freedom, individuals, life continues.
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