Among the arsonists fanning the flames of the Israel-Hamas conflict that is about to devour the Middle East and perhaps the world, Recep Tayyip Erdogan occupies a major place. President of a large Muslim nation, a member of NATO and calling for its integration into the European area, he has issued a resounding and sinister proclamation. On 26 October, three days before the centenary of the Republic founded by Atatürk, Erdogan declared before his country’s parliament: “Hamas is not a terrorist group, it is a group of liberators protecting their land!
Surrounded by European Union countries that consider the Palestinian Islamist organisation to be terrorist, Switzerland continues not to apply sanctions to Hamas, nor to ban its leaders from its territory. But since the attacks on 7 October, the Federal Council (government) has decided to use the word “terrorism” to describe the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. It has also announced that it is going to carry out a “detailed analysis of financial flows” to the Middle East, a very Swiss way of saying that the government intends to control the sources of funding for Hamas.
In addition to its homemade rockets, Hamas has been receiving Iranian Fajr-5 rockets with a range of 75 kilometres for the past two years. Iran also supplies Hamas with Russian Kornet anti-tank missiles. Some missiles of the same type are also believed to have been acquired in Libya.
Iran is clearly behind the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel on 7 October. Beyond the traditional Sunni-Shiite divide, the Iranian mullahs and the Palestinian Islamist movement have one thing in common: the Muslim Brotherhood and its doctrine of political Islam. Here are some explanations.
Officially founded in December 1987 by the Muslim Brother Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and two of his acolytes, Hamas has introduced Islamist fanaticism and suicide attacks into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, the roots of the terror practised by this Islamist movement, which lays claim to the Muslim Brotherhood, go much deeper into the history of the region. Its first mentor was Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War. This was followed by Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who sent his men to Palestine to fight against the Jews in 1948. And even more recently, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, urged Muslims from his al-Jazeera platform to take over from Hitler, who “administered the first divine punishment to the Jews” to “punish them for their corruption”.
The fanatical hordes of Hamas who carried out the attacks on 7 October have inherited an obsessive Judeophobia that has marked the history of the Muslim Brotherhood since it was founded in 1928.
7 October 2023 will remain an indelible date in the history of Israel and in the conscience of the world. A massacre without a name, crimes that even the most necrotic of imaginations would have been incapable of devising. Innocent people had a rendezvous with death at its most despicable. A death deliberately inflicted by fanatical men who had no more than a vague and deceptive notion of humanity.
