Why we should be helping Israel win, not bargaining with its — and our — incorrigible enemies.
I appreciate that our friend Hugh Hewitt had some kind words on X for this week’s podcast. Rich and I tackled a number of topics, but I acknowledge being spurred into a rant about the seemingly incorrigible refusal of the transnational-progressive U.S. foreign-policy clerisy to grapple with the reality that sharia supremacism is the predominant creed of the Muslim Middle East. This strategic malpractice (more than my notorious jihadist defendant’s malady) is the reason Willful Blindness was the title of my memoir about investigating and prosecuting terrorists.
Last weekend, my column was about the Biden-Harris DOJ’s aligning with the execrable United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which is effectively an arm of Hamas, in the lawsuit brought against it by victims of the October 7 barbarities. One of the worst aspects of UNRWA (there are many to choose from) is its commitment to the so-called right of return — the demand that 6 million Palestinian “refugees” (they’re not refugees) “return” to their “homes” in Israel (almost none of them ever lived there). This, of course, would destroy the Jewish state and is every bit as much a part of the anti-Israel, anti-Judaism jihad as Hamas’s mass murders, Hezbollah’s missile strikes, and Iran’s multifront aggression.
In the context of dilating on why UNRWA, Hamas, and their sharia-supremacist allies insist on the right of return, I said the following — which is pretty much what I railed about during the podcast:
So . . . what is behind the UNRWA’s “right of return” tenet — shared, not coincidentally, by Hamas? Well, the answer to this question should have been well-known in the United States for at least 30 years. That’s when the Justice Department prosecution team I led tried the so-called Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and several of his subordinate jihadists on terrorism charges, a task that required us to expose for an American jury the sharia-supremacist ideology that catalyzed the sundry plots to carry out bombings and political assassinations.
The salient ideology is undeniably derived from a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic scripture that remains authoritative in the Middle East — including in the Palestinian territories. Yet the transnational progressives who dominate Western governments and media persist in denying that this ideology exists, or at least denying that its powerful influence grips more than a relative handful of “extremists.” Hence, even though we were not precluded from proving reality in the courtroom, a fantasy is assiduously peddled to the public — lest you begin to question such dogma as the “two-state solution,” in which we’re to believe that Israelis and the “From the River to the Sea” crowd will live side-by-side in irenic bliss.
Behind the UNRWA’s “right of return” mantra are two animating principles of sharia supremacism.
The first is that any territory that Islam claims, either in scripture or by subsequent conquest (which is scripturally endorsed) is deemed Islamic in perpetuity. If such a territory is annexed by non-Muslims, Muslims are obliged to conduct jihad (seen as “defensive”) until the territory is returned to Islamic rule. Now, Israel was the Jewish homeland for millennia before Islam was “revealed” to Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, in the early seventh century a.d. (I know I’m supposed to say “c.e.,” but under the circumstances that doesn’t seem right). Nevertheless, a dubious but long-standing interpretation of Islamic scripture holds that Israel, particularly Jerusalem, is central to Islam. (It is claimed to be the launch point for Muhammad’s “night journey” to heaven in around 621.) And in the nearly 14 centuries between the Rashidun Caliphate’s conquest of Jerusalem in 637 and the Ottoman Empire’s post-World War I collapse (giving way to Mandatory Palestine under British control), Israel was regularly under Islamic rule, although Jews continued to live there. In sharia supremacism, once it has been under Islamic rule, a lost jurisdiction must be brought back under Islamic rule as soon as Muslims have the wherewithal for reconquest.
The second principle, deep-seated in sharia supremacism, is enmity toward Jews. Muhammad’s army fought Jewish tribes after those tribes spurned his efforts to entice them to accept Islam. Moreover, Islamic eschatology — reflected in the al-Bukhari and Muslim hadiths — holds that there will be a final confrontation in which Muslims slaughter Jews. This is expressly reaffirmed in Hamas’s charter. As the self-proclaimed “Islamic Resistance Movement,” Hamas there “aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.” What promise? As Muhammad put it:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'”
This is not a fringe belief. Not only is it founded in scripture; it was a favorite theme of the Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most influential Sunni Islamic jurisprudent in modern history, who died in 2022. Qaradawi’s television program, Sharia and Life, broadcast by Qatar-based Al Jazeera, had a weekly audience of millions. Hamas took Qaradawi as its authoritative sharia scholar, marinating in his instruction that “the martyr operations” against Israel were “the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.”
I will add, for the umpti-umpth time, that were it not for the bravery and skill of patriotic, pro-Western Muslims, we could not have successfully penetrated jihadist organizations, waged war efficiently against them, and successfully tried jihadists who were brought into our justice system. But just because we know and admire such people, just because we wish a critical mass of them were calling the tune in the Muslim Middle East, does not change the facts on the ground that must be dealt with. The ideology has to be defeated over the long haul, but that must start with utterly defeating sharia-supremacist regimes and their jihadist militias, eliminating their capacity to project power and illustrating their weakness and backwardness.
Israel has to win and we should be helping it win, not fortifying our mutual enemies with inane nuclear deals that enrich and empower them, and with cease-fires that enable them to revive, rearm, and redeploy.