It seemed to me oddly appropriate that it was in this peaceful Swiss village where I have been for the past three weeks that I should learn that peace is breaking out in Gaza. For many days I watched the news about the latest ‘deal in Gaza’ with skepticism and a weary sense of déjà vu. We have been here before too many times. And then, at the very last moment, there has been some hitch that prevented the last living hostages from being released by the monsters who constitute Hamas. This time, they say, is different and Donald Trump plans to be in Jerusalem around the time you read this, so we must hope that it is. And that the hostages who remain alive will finally be released.
At a personal level, my deepest concern since the atrocities committed by Hamas’ Islamic warriors on October 7, 2023, has been for the hostages. Often, I have thought of the babies that were taken down into those tunnels under Gaza. Often, I have wondered if they were separated from their parents. Often, I have wondered if there was anyone to explain to them why their innocent lives were plunged into darkness. And if there was someone to explain to them that it was not their fault that any of these things happened. When the tiny coffins of those two little boys were handed back by their Hamas captors, I felt as if children from my own family had died. Kfir Bibas was nine months old, and his brother Ariel was four. Among the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas, there were 36 children.
It is no longer politically correct to remember the suffering of the Israeli children who were taken hostage. It is the suffering of the thousands of children of Gaza that we are reminded of every day by the Western media. But this column has never been politically correct. I think what has happened to the people of Gaza in the past two years is one of the greatest tragedies ever and the men who stopped food and basic healthcare from entering Gaza are demons. But the thing we seem to forget is that this would not have happened if Hamas had just released the hostages.
There would not have been this horrible war if the hostages had been released. Gaza would not have been turned into a place of broken people and broken buildings if the hostages had been released. So why did Hamas not release them? Was it because they believed, as some of their leaders have admitted, that allowing their own people to be killed was a necessary sacrifice? Speaking for myself, I blame Hamas for almost all that has happened. More than Benjamin Netanyahu, although his name will be recorded in the annals of evil.
This column has been accused of Islamophobia before, so I do not hesitate to say that Hamas is a death cult, and its fanatical terrorists are motivated by an ideology that is, in my view, the Nazism of our time. This ideology does not have a name but can be called jihadism and we see too many people in our own country who subscribe to it. There are some fake liberals, and I think of myself as a true liberal, who like to expound upon the theory that jihadism is the same as Hindutva.
It is wrong to say this because there is not a religious book in the entire literature of the Sanatan Dharma that says killing non-believers is something God approves of. Islam does sanction the beheading of us idol-worshipping types and it is from this sanction that death cults like Hamas draw inspiration. On our sub-continent, there are jihadists who believe that killing ‘kafirs’ is a religious duty and there are those in the Middle East who believe killing Jews is a religious duty. One of the images that has engraved itself in my brain from the horrors of October 7, 2023, is of a Hamas warrior calling his father to tell him proudly that he had killed 10 Jews with his own hands. People who can talk like this are sick and it is time to say this loudly.
The point I am trying to make is that what has happened in Gaza has happened because of the sick ideology that Hamas believes in. No cause in the world justifies taking small children hostage and keeping them confined underground for months. To do that is barbarism. It is true that more than 67,000 people have been killed in Gaza, of which many were children and women, and that is truly tragic and very, very sad. But if the hostages are released by next week and a kind of peace breaks out in Gaza, it could be time for those who voted for Hamas to stop and think about the kind of people they chose to represent them.
There are too many ‘moderate’ Muslims who refuse to confront the truth that the ideology that has created death cults like Hamas is one that gets its sanction from Islam. If the Quran is, as Muslims believe, the final message of Allah, then it could be time for the Islamic clergy to say that this message has now been dangerously misunderstood by the men who believe that brutality in Allah’s name is brutality that is for the good of humankind.