By Col. Bill Connor ——Bio and Archives--October 21, 2023
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Most Americans have now learned the extent of the atrocities committed by Hamas, and many are in shock and disbelief. Civilian women and children murdered in their homes and even burned alive. Reports of decapitation of babies. Women raped and murdered and desecrated or taken hostage with children. A peaceful gathering of young people turned into hundreds slaughtered.
Col. Bill Connor and Col. W. Thomas Smith Jr. appearing on Newsmax TV's CHRIS SALCEDO SHOW on Oct. 17, 2023
The atrocities were so bad that those attempting to defend Hamas have taken to denials of horrendous murders committed. That’s despite the murderers’ gleeful videos of the bloodshed posted in real time. Many can’t understand how Hamas terrorists could commit such despicable acts and applaud the slaughter of innocents. From my experience in the region in 1996-97, going between the Arab side and Israel on peacekeeping duties out of the Sinai, the explanation is the same as for Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s and Rwanda in 1994: The deliberate dehumanizing of a group of people to the point that murders are deemed as justifying the killing of cockroaches. With Arab Muslims surrounding Israel, the dehumanizing has gone on for decades, while so many in the West purposely ignored it or tried to diminish the danger.
First, as with the 1920 book “Life unworthy of life”, which became a blueprint for the Nazi dehumanization of Jews, the Hamas Charter of 1987 similarly dehumanized Jews.
Among the anti-Jewish quotes of the charter, is the following Hadith from Al-Bukhari: “The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”
The charter also includes the Nazi-ish dribble: “With their [Jews’] money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein… With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
This type rhetoric goes well beyond Hamas, which is the Palestinian offshoot of the Egyptian created Muslim Brotherhood which has spewed anti-Jewish rhetoric since it was founded in the 1920s.
To give an idea about the extent of the Muslim Brotherhood’s dehumanizing of Jews, in 2011 the Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt, Muhammed Morsi, publicly proclaimed that Jews were “sons of Apes and Pigs.”
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When I was in the region, I was shocked by the mainstreamed “Apes and Pigs” comments about Jews. At that time and since, the fraudulent anti-Jewish “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” were bestsellers in the region and believed. In 2009, Saudi Sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, told worshipers that Jews were, “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.” The same year Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Ya’qub claimed on TV: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not, the Jews are infidels not because I say so but because Allah does… They aren’t our enemies because they occupy Palestine; they would be our enemies even if they had not occupied anything.”
Sheikh Ahmad Ali Othman of the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments, explained of the Muslim prohibition on eating pork that “the pigs living today are descended from those Jews [whom Allah turned into swine].” Note that when the Hutu majority in Rwanda slaughtered 600,000 Tutsis with machetes in 1994, the ubiquitous call to slaughter was “kill the cockroaches.”
The Jewish dehumanization goes well beyond an extreme fringe. A 2008 Global pew poll found that an astonishing 95-percent of Egyptians, 96-percent Jordanians, and 97-percent of Lebanese had unfavorable views of Jews.
It’s important to note that after Israel’s 1948-49 War of Independence, Jews were expelled from throughout the Arab-Muslim world. Unlike the state of Israel, in which almost two-million Israeli citizens are Arab Muslim Palestinians (with seats in the Knesset and on the High Court), the surrounding Arab controlled countries have no Jews. Hamas has no Jews, as Israel expelled the last Jewish settlers in 2005 for peace with the Palestinians. It becomes easier to dehumanize a group of people you don’t live around all the while being fed hateful propaganda.
It is time for the West, including much of anti-Israel media, to start calling out this dehumanization. The slaughter on October 7 was a breakdown of all civilized norms and ethics brought on by decades of inexcusable dehumanization the media would never ignore if even a portion was by right-wing extremists.
Genesis 1:27 proclaims “God created mankind in his own image in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” No “life is unworthy of living”, no person is a “cockroach” and Jews are not “apes and pigs”. After October 7, we can no longer remain silent.
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