The Biden Regime Should Admit the Real Causes of the Jihad Against Israel

Twenty-two years after 9/11, the jihadis’ best friends are in the White House.

by Robert Spencer 38 Comments   October 9, 2023

When Hamas launched its latest jihad war against Israel, the Biden regime’s initial response was mind-numbingly predictable. At 2:58AM on Saturday, the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs tweeted in Arabic: “The US Embassy is closely monitoring the security situation as a result of rockets being fired from Gaza through southern and central Israel, including Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the infiltration of Hamas activists.” Yeah, “activists” with balaclavas and rifles, committing murder wherever they had the chance.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the same Office followed up at 3:24AM with an even more jaw-droppingly tone-deaf and wrongheaded statement: “We unequivocally condemn the attack of Hamas terrorists and the loss of life that has incurred.” Of course, the low-level Biden regime foreign service wonks who knocked together this boilerplate said nothing about bankrolling the attacks and making them possible. The wonks continued: “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks. Terror and violence solve nothing.”

In other words, Israel must not respond to the breaching of its borders and wholesale murder of its citizens. That would be a “retaliatory attack,” and would solve nothing. This statement was consistent with the stance of the Biden regime and American administrations going back years: after every jihad attack against Israel, no matter how brutal and bloodthirsty, the United States urges Israel to exercise the utmost restraint in defending itself, and not engage in a “disproportionate” response. The U.S. also would then urge Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Arabs that would presumably pacify them.

This ignored the root causes of the conflict, which the U.S. government has been resolutely ignoring ever since jihadis with the same ideology as those who are fighting to destroy Israel struck our own country on September 11, 2001.

Media analysts are describing the latest attacks as a retaliation for Israel’s supposed desecration of the al-Aqsa Mosque, or for “settlement” activity, and all the usual half-truths, distortions and outright lies that characterize establishment media coverage of Israel. Ultimately, however, this is happening not because of al-Aqsa, or because of any “occupation,” since the “occupation” is a propaganda fiction anyway. It’s happening because of the Islamic imperative to fight Jews.

A hadith says: “Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim 6985) Read the beginning of the words attributed to Muhammad again: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight the Jews and the Muslims would kill them.”

So this is not a hadith about the “last day.” It is a hadith about the conditions under which the “last day” will come about, and how Muslims can bring about the “last day”: by killing Jews. The true believers of Hamas are busy doing it now.

In light of that, the Islamic State (ISIS) explains that Muslims’ struggle against Israel is eschatological, not political, although it acknowledges that analysts have generally missed this: “Most people have disregarded the Quranic characterization of the Jews and its aim. They have instead concerned themselves with a historical narrative of events, thereby deviating from the roots of the conflict.” These mistaken analysts, says ISIS, think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict arose over “lands and possessions.” It asks: “Is there any pretext left on which someone can claim that the war with the Jews is not religious?”

This idea didn’t originate with ISIS. Many Muslim clerics have been saying it for years. According to The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, Egyptian imam Muhammad Hussein Ya’qoub made the same point back in 2009 when he said: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them. Absolutely not. The Jews are infidels—not because I say so, and not because they are killing Muslims, but because Allah said: ‘The Jews say that Uzair is the son of Allah, and the Christians say that Christ is the son of Allah. These are the words from their mouths. They imitate the sayings of the disbelievers before. May Allah fight them. How deluded they are.’ [Qur’an 9:30] It is Allah who said that they are infidels.”

Another Muslim cleric, Sheikh Said Al-Afani, contradicted the accepted wisdom in the West when he said: “Our hatred of them is purely on religious grounds, and not because of the pure, sacred land, which was blessed by Allah, or because of Gaza…not only because of Al-Aqsa and so on. We hate them, first and foremost, because of their enmity towards Allah, and because they slayed our prophets.”

Abdallah Jarbu, Hamas’ deputy minister of religious endowments, on Al-Aqsa TV on Feb. 28, 2010, condemned on Islamic grounds anyone who wants to negotiate with the Israelis: “I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values.”

It is because of such views that Palestinian jihadis rape, torture, and murder Israeli civilians and then celebrate having done so. It is the resolute refusal of the Biden regime to acknowledge the Islamic aspect of the conflict that leads it to continue to prescribe the wrong solutions for that conflict, and to pressure Israel when it should be pressuring the Palestinians. Twenty-two years after 9/11, the jihadis’ best friends are in the White House.