Hamas: Made in the U.S.A.

By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, NATIONAL REVIEW   November 25, 2023

After the jihadist barbarities of October 7, Israel responded with aerial bombardments of Hamas havens in Gaza, in preparation for the now-ongoing ground invasion. As the bombs fell, Hamas heavyweight Mousa Abu Marzook was asked about the elaborate network of tunnels that the organization has built under the territory it has governed since being popularly elected in 2006. It is a virtual underground city stretching over 300 miles, constructed with untold billions of dollars in foreign-aid money diverted for the purpose (not to be confused with the aid money diverted to make billionaires out of Marzook and his fellow Hamas emirs).

Since Hamas has built tunnels instead of bomb shelters, the friendly Russia Today TV reporter wondered, why doesn’t it just let Gazans use the tunnels to shelter from Israeli attacks?

Marzook’s answer was chillingly matter-of-fact. The tunnels were not built for so-called civilians; they were built for the jihadists:

We have built the tunnels because we have no other way of protecting ourselves from being targeted and killed. These tunnels are meant to protect us from the airplanes. We are fighting from inside the tunnels.

Of course Marzook (sometimes spelled “Mazouk” or “Marzuq”) is not fighting from inside a tunnel. He was speaking from his posh offices in Qatar. There, he and the rest of Hamas’s “politburo” are harbored and abetted by the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Doha that President Biden — building on the Obama–Biden administration’s empowerment of Qatar, despite its record of material support to jihadists — has formally denominated a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States. Hamas has been formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law since 1994, yet the Obama–Biden administration greenlit the establishment of a Hamas headquarters in Doha in 2012 — just as it similarly greenlit the establishment of a Taliban headquarters that Qatar, of course, was delighted to host.

Remember, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Twenty-two years ago seems like an alternative universe now.

In Doha, the native of Gaza has landed softly, as ever, after bouncing from Amman to Damascus to Cairo. Following his faraway treks these last three decades, one almost forgets that it was in the United States that he helped forge Hamas — and even ran it for a time.

The Brotherhood’s Lifeblood Is the Campus

I recounted Marzook’s exploits in The Grand Jihad, my 2010 book about the partnership between the political Left and the Brotherhood — the most successful global sharia-supremacist movement in modern history. (The Brotherhood, which has numerous satellite organizations, is frequently referred to as the Ikhwan — shorthand for Jam?’at al-Ikhw?n al-Mulism?n, the Society of the Muslim Brothers. It was established in Egypt after the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.) While I’d love to take credit for as perfect a description of the Brotherhood’s sharia-supremacist project as “the grand jihad,” it is perfect because it comes directly from the Brotherhood itself. The phrase appears in an internal Brotherhood memorandum, which was central to the Justice Department’s eventual terrorism-financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development — the “charity” that served as Hamas’s American piggy bank.

In the memo, expounding on its mission in the United States, Marzook’s confederate, Mohamed Akram, wrote:

The Ikwhan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands [i.e., the Westerners’ own hands] and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Those words were written in 1991. By then, Marzook had been at this civilizational jihad in America for a decade.

The Brotherhood is a movement that sprang from universities and has always catalyzed campus radicalism. Its two most formative figures, founder Hassan al-Banna and his successor Sayyid Qutb, were academics. The Brotherhood’s guiding jurisprudent in the modern era, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, was a scholar at al-Azar University, the center of Sunni Islamic scholarship for over a millennium. So was another Brotherhood eminence, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (dubbed “the Emir of Jihad”), whom I prosecuted in the early-to-mid-Nineties, and whose students’ movement (Gama’at al Islamiyya, the Islamic Group) was principally responsible for murdering Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 over the peace he’d made with Israel.