Hamas has always had and still has grandiose plans to enslave and slaughter Israel’s Jews

During World War II, the Nazis envisioned enslaving and eventually exterminating the Jewish race. Muslims in the Middle East and Central Europe were happy to make common cause with the Nazis as Nazi goals aligned with Mohamed’s mandateIt turns out that Hamas has the exact same plans this time around. In the 1940s, the civilized world stopped the Muslim and Nazi plans; this time, the world is no longer civilized and is abetting this great evil.

I’m going to lead with a personal anecdote here. From December 1941 through August 1945, my mother was a civilian prisoner of the Japanese in Java. She weighed 75 pounds at war’s end. What’s interesting for the purposes of this essay is how she ended up in that situation.

Mom was born in Java, which was then a Dutch colony. In 1935, when she was 12, her father, a Zionist who was concerned about Hitler’s rise (the family was in Austria by then), relocated to British Mandate Palestine (“BMP”).

Life in Tel Aviv was hard in the 1930s but got easier once World War II started. That was because the British started pouring resources into BMP. Troops flooded in, many with money to spend, and the military built up an infrastructure. My grandfather, an architect, got work with a British government paycheck attached.

Image: Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-004-09A / Heinrich Hoffmann / CC-BY-SA 3.0

To a man, in the early years of the war, the British officers told my grandfather that they were dubious about their chances against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. If Rommel’s forces prevailed, they said, the Nazis would give the local Arab population permission and weapons with which to slaughter every Jewish man and boy while either slaughtering or sexually enslaving the Jewish women and girls. (Think: ISIS on a grander scale.)

My grandfather, therefore, had the bright idea to send my mom to Java, far from the war. He never could have predicted the Japanese entry into the war.

My point with this family history is that it shows that the Arabs have long dreamed of slaughtering and enslaving the Jews who live on the land that is now Israel. That’s why I was completely unsurprised to learn that Hamas really believes that it can prevail in this war and that, when it wins, it can slaughter and enslave the Jews.

According to a cadre of connected Gazans who escaped Gaza early in the war and headed to Cairo, Hamas has never abandoned the dream that local Arabs had in the 1930s:

“We have a registry of the numbers of Israeli apartments and institutions, educational institutions and schools, gas stations, power stations and sewage systems, and we have no choice but to get ready to manage them,” Obeid told the conference.

One issue was how to treat the Israelis. “In dealing with the Jewish settlers on Palestinian land, there must be a distinction in attitudes toward [the following]: a fighter, who must be killed; a [Jew] who is fleeing and can be left alone or be prosecuted for his crimes in the judicial arena; and a peaceful individual who gives himself up and can be [either] integrated or given time to leave.” They agreed that, “This is an issue that requires deep deliberation and a display of the humanism that has always characterized Islam.”

More specifically, the issue of a brain drain was discussed. “Educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology and civilian and military industry should be retained [in Palestine] for some time and should not be allowed to leave and take with them the knowledge and experience that they acquired while living in our land and enjoying its bounty, while we paid the price for all this in humiliation, poverty, sickness, deprivation, killing and arrests,” the conference’s concluding statement asserted.

Thankfully, in the 1940s, the civilized world banded together to fight back against the Nazis. By doing so, they prevented the Arabs in and around BMP from fulfilling Mohamed’s mandate to slaughter and/or enslave all the Jews. However, we’re not a civilized world in 2024. This time, while the Muslim dreams remain unchanged, the surrounding world, including Democrats in America, is happy to work with Hamas to make that dream a reality.

For Israelis, of course, October 7 was a preview of Hamas’s planned coming attractions. That’s why they are fighting back with every fiber of their collective beings.