Yes, Free Palestine…From Hamas

The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend.

September 15th, 2001. After telling friends he’s going to “kill the ragheads responsible for September 11,” Frank Roque shoots and kills Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona. Despite being Sikh, Sodhi became the first of over 1700 victims of anti-Muslim hate crimes following the attacks.

And quite right too. If he didn’t want to be murdered, he shouldn’t have flown those planes into the Twin Towers.

March 13th, 2020. Abraham Choi is standing in a bathroom in Penn Station when a man starts spitting and coughing on him. “You Chinese f*ck,” the man says. “All of you should die, and all of you have the Chinese virus.”

Given that Choi is Korean American, not Chinese, he claimed to be more shocked than angry. But I’m not sure what he expected. If he didn’t want to be assaulted, he shouldn’t have invented COVID.

October 15th, 2023. Eight days after the October 7th terror attacks, six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume is stabbed to death by his 71-year-old landlord, Joseph Czuba. Czuba, who attended Wadea’s birthday party just a few weeks before, stabbed him 26 times while shouting, “You Muslims must die.”

And while it’s tragic, I guess it can’t be helped. If six-year-old Wadea didn’t want to be hacked to death, why did he kill all those people in Israel?

Usually, when you see this degree of ignorance, it’s only coming from one direction.

One side calls for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” but the other understands that the 3.5 million Muslims (and 280,000 Sikhs) living in America are Americans.

One side attacks Asians over the “China virus,” but the other understands that it’s idiotic to hold 1.5 billion Chinese people, never mind all 4.5 billion Asian people, responsible for a pandemic.

But Palestinians, metaphorically speaking, are getting it from both ends.

One side thinks Palestine is Hamas, so they shrug their shoulders as Israel kills 10,000 civilians (over 4000 of them children) in “self-defence.”

And the other thinks Hamas is Palestine, so they celebrate and justify Hamas’ terrorism as if it’s somehow going to help Palestinians.

The problem is, Hamas doesn’t care about Palestinians.

Here’s Ghazi Hamad, from the Hamas Political Bureau, saying as much just a few days ago:

We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will [commit terror attacks] again and again because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight […]

Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.

Here’s Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’ senior leadership, explaining that they’d rather spend billions of dollars on weapons and mansions than improve conditions in Gaza:

Hamas’ goal is not to run Gaza and to bring it water and electricity and such. This battle was not because we wanted fuel or labourers. It did not seek to improve the situation in Gaza. This battle is to completely overthrow the situation.

And for the avoidance of any doubt, here’s the passage from the Hadith that Hamas quotes in its founding charter, laying out their plan to overthrow the “situation”:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.

Hamas massacred Israeli civilians on October 7th for the same reason they attacked a club full of Israeli teenagers in 2011 and blew up a bus full of Israeli children in 2003; Hamas is hellbent on killing as many Jews as possible and wiping Israel off the map.

But let’s be clear, Hamas’ hatred isn’t limited to Jews. They’re perfectly happy to slaughter Palestinian civilians.

In 2007, Hamas and rival party, Fatas, engaged in running gun battles in Palestinian neighbourhoods and even inside Palestinian hospitals, killing bystanders, aid workers and unarmed demonstrators who called for an end to the violence.

In 2014, in a purge codenamed “Operation: Strangling Necks,” Hamas abducted and tortured Palestinian civilians who they accused of “collaborating” with Israel, killing at least 23. They did the same thing in 2013, 2010 and 2009.

In 2019, Hamas security forces beat, tortured, and illegally detained hundreds of Palestinian civilians and human rights workers for protesting the economic conditions they face in Gaza, conditions made possible by Hamas’ financial corruption and palpable disdain for the Palestinian people.

And on October 7th, 2023, Hamas launched a savage attack, provoking a brutal retaliatory strike on Gaza that anybody with a double-digit IQ could have predicted.

Hamas has acted in perfect opposition to the aims, needs and welfare of the Palestinian people ever since they came to power. Yet, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian voices in the West seem to think they’re all the same (it’s worth noting that Palestinian voices in Gaza are less confused).

So yes, free Palestine.

Free Palestine from the “collective punishment” Israel is currently inflicting on its civilians. Free Palestine from the “illegal and inhumane blockade” on Gaza. Free Palestine from the apartheid system that denies them the same rights granted to Jews.

And don’t forget, free Palestine from Hamas, the single greatest obstacle to any of that happening.

There are no winners in war. There’s no moral purity. Vanishingly few people deserve to die.

And while there are two sides here, it’s not Israelis versus Palestinians or Jews against Muslims. It’s sane, ordinary people who want to live in peace and bloodthirsty fanatics who want to wipe each other out.

Luckily, I have a solution.

How about we leave the land from the river to the sea, to everyone who can coexist with their fellow humans. Everyone willing to tolerate a neighbour who worships a different God or speaks a different language, everyone who wants to live in peace, without blockades or apartheid or rockets destroying their homes.

And everybody else, everyone who defends terrorism or condones war crimes or calls the slaughter of innocents a “heroic example,” can go stand in the desert with their children, buy all the weapons they want, and see how righteous they feel as the bombs drop on their heads.

Sure, they might complain when they can’t hide in tunnels or shelter in bunkers or spew hot takes from the safety of Twitter, but it can’t be helped.

If they don’t want to die over a conflict they have nothing to do with, at least they’ll finally understand how the civilians in Gaza and Israel feel.

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