Changing perceptions of Islam, Part 5: “After the Bibas mother and boys atrocity, who supports Hamas out loud?”

Special series for Ramadan 1446

In this series, Murtadd to Human looks at perceptions of Islam after a year in which Muslims went from euphoria in the wake of their October 7 “moment of triumph” to silence, bewilderment and depression as their “freedom fighters,” Hamas and Hezbollah, cling on for dear life, Iran and the Houthis nervously watch the skies and it turns out the indefatigable George Galloway is not so indefatigable after all. Well, those were the headlines. We want look at what in the old days we used to call ‘the inside pages’, news that doesn’t make the front pages, specifically, at articles, podcasts or videos of ex-Muslim perceptions of Islam and Muslim defence of Islam in light of events over the last year.

Part 5 concludes our series. Today is the last day of Ramadan. Tomorrow they feast. Thank you reading this special Ramadan series, and a special thanks to all who contributed with their commentaries.

After the Bibas mother and boys atrocity, who supports Hamas out loud?

Steve Apfel

[…]

So, after forensics revealed that the ‘barbarians at the gates’ had throttled toddlers with their bare hands, who supports Hamas out loud? One can’t think why anyone would. They might as well make an excuse that they mistook ‘resistance’ to refer to a land swap proposal. It explains the loud silence that met horrific findings about tiny corpses dismembered to support a dingbat claim that Kfir and Ariel Bibas were killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Every once in a while reaction to the darkest of dark events opens an exhibit of personality sickness. Reaction to the ‘black Sabbath’ on 7/10 displayed the personality disorder that had got away with pouring out complaints about Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs. The savagery of that day somehow blew a gasket in the West. Super-heated steam roiled out as though from infernal regions. All hell broke loose while Israelis were still reeling from the trauma. Hell is not hyperbole to describe how America and Europe erupted. To paraphrase Milton’s poetic epic Paradise Lost: “Infernal Thunder and Lightning and Black fire shot with equal rage.”

The usual suspects flew their colours. The BBC gave drug-deranged rapists, mutilators and decapitators the honorary title, ‘Militants’. Nobler still, Amnesty called Oct 7 an “operation by fighters into Southern Israel”. Fellow humanistic charities looked at 1,200 peaceniks put to death as “military offensives” (Oxfam) or as an “escalation in violence” (Save the Children). Versions of “beautiful and inspiring” rang from campuses and piazzas. Ivy League presidents protected calls for Israel to be eliminated. Groups with ‘peace’ in their name bellowed for a fatwa against the Jews.

Rallies dubbed ‘pro-Palestinian’ made no demands on Hamas to let Palestinian Arab schools and hospitals and tenements alone and not use them for bunkers and armouries and hostage hideouts. Reuters and AP journalists took rides with the invaders to encourage and record frenzied slaughter. The UN Secretary General sighed that the atrocity did “not happen in a vacuum,” meaning that Hamas had a reason to emulate the Holocaust. The lawyer at the Human Rights Council interpreted humanitarian law to mean that Jew-occupiers could not claim the right to self defence.

The rest is here.

The Hypocrisy of the Pro-Palestinian Camp

As a former Muslim apologist and preacher, I once stood in the ranks of those who fervently defended Islam’s image at every turn. I debated, I argued, and I sought to present my faith as a beacon of justice and truth. But those days are long gone. Reality has a way of breaking even the most fortified walls of delusion.

Nothing has exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement more than its shameful, unrepentant embrace of Hamas. The grim revelation of the Bibas family’s fate—a mother and her children throttled by Hamas’s bloody hands—should have triggered universal condemnation. Yet, where were the righteous cries from the self-proclaimed defenders of humanity? Silence. Or worse, a denialist acrobatics routine so absurd it could belong in a circus. Instead of demanding Hamas answer for its barbarity, we witnessed the usual contortions: blaming Israel, feigning ignorance, or indulging in grotesque celebrations of Jewish suffering.

Steve Apfel’s piece meticulously lays out an uncomfortable truth: there is no genuine distinction between being “pro-Palestinian” and supporting Hamas. The mask has slipped, revealing a movement that does not care about the well-being of Palestinian civilians but rather exults in the destruction of Jews. If these supposed humanitarians truly cared for the Palestinian people, they would demand an end to Hamas’s reign of terror over Gaza. Instead, they lionise it, excuse its atrocities, and cheer as it turns hospitals and schools into military installations.

The so-called “human rights” organisations are complicit in this charade. When 1,200 Israelis—men, women, children, and infants—were slaughtered, raped, and mutilated on October 7, Amnesty International and Oxfam did not condemn Hamas as genocidal but rather sanitised its crimes with euphemisms like “military operation.” The BBC, that bastion of cowardly equivocation, refused to call the murderers what they are: terrorists. Instead, they were dignified with the term “militants,” as though they were mere guerrilla fighters rather than rabid butchers. The UN, meanwhile, sighed that Hamas’s actions “did not happen in a vacuum,” a veiled justification for infanticide.

It is worth asking: how do the “pro-Palestinian” activists justify their blind loyalty to Hamas? Does their concern for Palestinian suffering extend to the mothers who are executed for defying Hamas’s brutal theocracy? Do they mourn the young men murdered for the crime of protesting Hamas’s corruption? Do they condemn Hamas for hijacking aid meant for civilians? Of course not. Because to them, Palestinian lives only matter when they can be weaponised against Israel.

A true advocate for Palestinians would demand that Egypt open its borders to allow refugees safe passage. A genuine humanitarian would demand Hamas stop using hospitals as command centres. An honest activist would recognise that the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people is not Israel, but Hamas itself. Yet we hear none of this. Why? Because the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement is not about saving Palestinians—it is about destroying Jews.

This is a sickness of the mind, as Paul Johnson so aptly put it. Not just a variety of racism, but a pathology—one that manifests in universities, newsrooms, and so-called human rights groups, all singing in unison with Hamas’s genocidal agenda. They bay for Israel’s surrender, knowing full well that Hamas would rebuild and launch another massacre. They demand ceasefires while hostages remain in cages, knowing that Hamas would use the lull to rearm. Their ultimate demand is clear: Israel must be defenceless, must be vulnerable, must—above all—suffer.

Apfel rightly points to Jean-Paul Sartre’s description of the anti-Semite as a murderer who represses his desire to kill but can barely contain it. That is the “pro-Palestinian” movement today: an army of closet Jew-haters, dressed in the language of human rights but salivating at the sight of Jewish coffins.

Hamas itself, meanwhile, is a parody of resistance—an organisation so incompetent that it cannot even safeguard the people under its rule. It murders them, starves them, and exploits their suffering for propaganda. It is a cult of death, whose leaders sit in Qatar’s luxury hotels while the Gazan people rot in ruins. And its cheerleaders in the West are no better—chanting for intifada from the safety of their ivory towers while pretending they have the moral high ground.

The tragedy of Hamas is that it could have built a thriving Palestinian state in Gaza, free from occupation, with resources at its disposal. Instead, it chose war, slaughter, and ideological fanaticism. And for that, it deserves not just condemnation, but unrelenting ridicule. After all, what kind of “resistance” fights from behind children, steals food from its own people, and then hides in tunnels like rats?

The answer is simple: not a resistance, but a disease. One that the world should be working to cure, not legitimise.

Jalal Tagreeb
Former imam

Eid Mubarak. “Let us love, Let us be loved”

Strung up in lights between the minarets of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul are the words: “Sevelim, Sevilelim”, “Let us love, Let us be loved.” A virtuous encouragement at the conclusion of the Islamic holy, fasting month of Ramadan and the start of Eid al-Fitr, when it is forbidden to fast. And after a month of intense spirituality, certainly, they love; and how very touching it is to want to be loved. Is it not a most natural, human need, and the most beautiful one?

Muslims, the people of sacrifice and togetherness; a relentless message pumped into living rooms in minute detail in every Western country. How beautiful; how colourful; how loving; how peaceful. Turn on all the lights. Pull out all the stops. Smile and dole out dates to passers by. If you don’t know how wonderful Muslims are, then there is something wrong with you. You might even be—dare I say it—Islamophobic.

These are not the same people as those who, for this entire month and more than a year prior, starved men, women and children, tortured them, raped them, mutilated them and killed them. Killed them? Is that the right word?

Just over a week before the start of the holy, spiritual, fasting month of Ramadan, Hamas put on a very special coffin show for all the hard-working, loyal Muslims of Gaza, something to dance over, to crude, blaring triumphalist music. The coffins, the world was led to believe, contained the bodies of four deceased Jews: Kfir Bibas (10 months old at time of death); his 4-year-old brother, Ariel Bibas; their mother, Shiri Bibas; and 83-year old Oded Lifshitz.

There was much cruelty in this handover (e.g., the coffins were padlocked and the keys did not fit), many lies (e.g., the coffins bore labels saying “Date of Arrest”); much torment (e.g., two captives were in a car, made to watch it all); much outrage (e.g., their children danced on the stage); much humiliation (e.g., Hamas was everywhere in full military fatigues and armed with Israeli weapons); and much deceit (e.g., the adult female corpse was not that of Shiri Bibas, as purported, but of an unknown Gazan woman—apparently, they love death).

None of this compares to the grotesque barbarism with which the Bibas children met their deaths. Hamas, and all the world that mindlessly parroted everything they claimed, insisted that the 10-month-old and 4-year-old died under the rubble when the Israeli Air Force bombed the building they were in. It turns out, the glorious mujahideen had strangled the two children to death, then pummelled their bodies with rocks so it would appear they had died under rubble!

It is not clear whether they were so ignorant that they didn’t know that any non-Muslim pathologist would immediately recognise the true cause of death, or whether they knew this and did it anyway to show their contempt. I lean towards the latter.

“After the Bibas mother and boys atrocity, who supports Hamas out loud?” asked Steve Apfel. It is a question asked by many, including myself, here, as Muslims prepared to go into their holy, spiritual month of fasting—Hamas plus all the Muslims around the world who had celebrated their “moment of triumph” on October 7. It was time for introspection, time to restore the soul.

Scores of Jews remain in captivity, some dead, others in various stages of alive. Their fast began on October 7 and will not end tonight. Tomorrow they will hear the Eid celebrations overhead or outside somewhere. Their captors certainly do not love them, and equally certainly seek no love from them. Eid or no Eid, we offer no love to such monsters, and it is just as well they do not seek any from us.

As for the millions of Westerners who passively took their daily fix of Islamic opium during Ramadan, how many of them still support Hamas out loud? The Muslims have their work cut out for them in Australia, where their obscene chanting on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on October 7 needs to be expunged from public memory pronto. The police got that process off to a good start by turning, “Kill the Jews!” into “Where’s the Jews?” The media, equally shameless, brought up the rear with an endless Ramadan extravaganza of Muslim minutiae. What babies? What coffins? Eid Mubarak. “Let us love, Let us be loved.”

Editor

Picture credit:

U?ur Ba?ak – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1284978