What is Hamas called? By Frédéric Encel – L’Express

From the outset, Hamas was violently hostile to the Oslo process. From 1993 to 1996, the Israeli government was on the left – with the Rabin-Peres tandem at its head -, supported by the Arab parties in the Knesset, and negotiated with the Palestinian Authority of Yasser Arafat, created in the wake of the agreements of the September 13, 1993.

Not only did Hamas reject the peace process, but it endeavored to destroy it by – already – carrying out massacres of civilians, via attacks in the Jewish neighborhoods of Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. Result: on May 29, 1996, a majority of Israelis, exasperated and traumatized by these carnages, elected the nationalist Netanyahu over the labor leader Peres.

In June 2007, while the IDF and the 20 settlements in the Gaza Strip had been evacuated two years earlier by the Sharon government, Hamas carried out a bloody putsch against… the legal and legitimate Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas. Radical Palestinian branch of the fanatical Brotherhood of Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, Hamas also frightens moderate Arab regimes. It was indeed the Muslim Brotherhood or their accomplices and cronies who killed Nobel Peace Prize winner Anwar el Sadat in 1981, as well as prime ministers, ministers, deputies, intellectuals and citizens throughout the Arab world, including in Morocco. in the 2010s.

Like all Islamisms, that of Hamas is violently anti-Semitic; in the charter constituting its creation, the Jews (and not only the Israelis) are described as “monkeys and pigs” and Judaism (and not only Zionism) as an “adulterated religion”. The sermons of the late Sheikh Yassin and those of other Hamas religious leaders repeat anti-Semitic clichés ad nauseam, and, during the pogrom of October 7, a Hamas assassin triumphantly announced to his parents that he had “killed ten Jews”, and not ten Israelis…

Moreover, no Hamas missile has struck Israeli Arab neighborhoods or villages. In this, Hamas is part of the logic of Daesh, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations around the world, but also of the so-called “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood in the West, which is only tactically, via takiyya (concealment), due to lack of favorable balance of power. We will note in passing the carelessness or cynicism of several Israeli governments having played on the weakening of the Palestinian Authority, undoubtedly believing that Hamas would be content to “manage” the low-intensity war, as well as its lucrative affairs in the Gaza strip. There is no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, will have to answer to a commission of inquiry.

Hamas is not only anti-Semitic, it loathes Christians (“crusaders”),kouffar” (disbelievers), “deviants” (homosexuals), “infidel” women, as well as the French Republic, Freemasonry and charitable clubs (Lions club and Rotary by name!). Misogynist and phallocrat, homophobic, racist , it rejects the arts, philosophies, sciences and, naturally, secularism and agnosticism, imposing in Gaza and advocating elsewhere an Islamist totalitarianism inspired by extremist exegetes such as Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyya. Like most groups fanatics, it occupied the social terrain where the PLO, then the Palestinian Authority, appeared as corrupt and indifferent. Hamas is just as corrupt – but to complain about it is to expose oneself to ferocious repression Not to mention his cynical use of Palestinian schools and hospitals, under which he hides his military headquarters…

Finally, the pogrom of October 7 committed against more than 1,300 civilians is an ultimate revealer – here of cowardice (“no waves!”), there of complacency (“yes, but the context…”), elsewhere of incompetence, among those who minimize or relativize its barbarity. Worse: we find racism and anti-Semitism here. Essentializing (by excessively infantilizing them in an identity assignment) Muslims in the manner of the new proletarians who are ontologically victims and for clientelist purposes, is racist. And anti-Zionism – that is, the rejection of the right of Jews to represent themselves as a people and of the UN right relating to sovereignty – is indeed a form of anti-Semitism.

* Frédéric Encel is an essayist and geopolitologist