IN HIS article, “Dispelling Israel’s myths” (DD, 18 August), Ran Greenstein mentions Gaza in his first paragraph, makes no mention of the Hamas charter and gives a misleading implied reference to Gaza when he writes about Palestinians “fighting for national liberation”.
What makes it impossible for Israel to reach a stable accommodation with Hamas is that Hamas’s global programme of jihad refuses on principle to make accommodation with Israel.
On principle, its ideology is one of war of conquest. Like all the very many other territories conquered under Koranic jihad in the past 1400 years, Israel is regarded by the Muslim Brothers – with Hamas its Palestinian wing – as belonging to the Waqf: territory permanently and unconditionally subject to Islamic rule under Sharia law.
The same applies to northern India, to Spain and Portugal, to Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece in eastern Europe, and to Georgia, the Crimea and other regions of the Caucasus in the former Soviet Union (before that, the Russian empire) – all previously under Muslim rule, following conquest by jihad.
Though forgotten equally by the West and by the former Soviet Union during the last century, jihad has been a norm of world history for 14 centuries, as it now reveals itself again.
No territory once conquered by Muslims is regarded by Hamas and its fellow-thinkers as not under obligation to be returned to Muslim rule.
By the nature of Sharia law, as asserted by Hamas, Islamic government must have an “apartheid” character, in so far as there must be no democracy and no equal citizenship.
Unless they convert to Islam, and in so far as they are permitted to survive, Jews and Christians as “People of the Book” are to be subject permanently to second class status as dhimmi, required to pay a special apartheid tax (jizya) and prohibited from exercising various normal civic functions available to Muslims.
In this way, apologists for Hamas turn the “apartheid state” argument on its head. They obscure the reality that second-class status for non-Muslims of an apartheid type is intrinsic to rule by Sharia, which Hamas makes plain it intends for Israel.
The situation is even worse in this ideology for people who are not monotheists, such as believers in traditional African religions, or Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and the Yazidis of northern Iraq, who are classified as kuffar, or infidels.
No fate is bad enough for kuffar, the Arabic word for “unbelievers” (gavour, in Turkish). This is the origin of the swearword “kaffir” in South Africa, which derives from Islamic enslavers of people in east Africa going back as early as the 7th century.
In the same way, the capture and enslavement of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria – repeated in northern Iraq with the capture of Yazidi and Christian women by the Islamic State, or Caliphate – is a form of sex slavery either for money-raising and/or the sexual satisfaction of soldiers, and is justified as Jihad al-Niqah (jihadi marriage).
In its treatment of women, it is the most brutal of forms of sexual apartheid.
What is now very difficult for many South Africans to grasp is that the state system of the Middle East is rapidly breaking down as very old religious divisions threaten to replace mainly secular state boundaries imposed in the colonial period.
The Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, with its secularist, materialist and atheist ethos, had an enormous effect on (Sunni Muslim) Turkey after World War 1, along with the influence of parliamentary, capitalist Britain, France and the United States (the victor powers), with long-lasting effects on Muslim countries throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Following the defeat of the Turkish Ottoman empire in the war, the military leader Kemal Ataturk carried out a profound secularising – though not socialist – revolution in Turkey, abolishing the Sunni Islamic Caliphate in 1924.
The Caliphate (or Khalifat Allah, meaning Caliph – deputy – of God) had ruled almost without interruption in Sunni Islamic territories for almost 13 centuries through successive Muslim dynasties based in different lands, since the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632.
Ataturk established Turkey as a secular state, unlike the former Ottoman empire in which political power had been identical with the religious leader, the Sultan, as Caliph, the deputy of God.
The written script of the Turkish language was changed from Arabic to the Roman alphabet, men were required to shave off their Muslim beards and women encouraged to remove the veil from their heads.
When de-colonisation swept through Muslim countries after World War 2, newly independent countries with an entirely or mainly Muslim population such as Pakistan and Indonesia in the east to Libya in the west assumed a similar form of government (usually republican), though not going as far as Ataturk in removing traditional forms of dress and Arabic or Arabic-derived script. The new political elites often looked very much to the Soviet Union for political and military support, strengthening the secularising current in political and intellectual life.
The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 very much weakened that former dominant current in many Muslim countries.
The ethos of national liberation – the main theme in Soviet propaganda, and in political and military support for former colonial Muslim countries – has given way increasingly in these countries to the much older priorities of Islam as a political religion, with no separation between church and state in its sacred book.
Among the Palestinians of Gaza, a national movement, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) with its military wing, al-Fatah, were ousted by the Islamic jihadi movement, Hamas, the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
The PLO, with Christian as well as Muslim members, and firm relations with anti-Zionist Jews, was replaced in Gaza by an organisation ideologically holding the same global perspective as the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya, all of them carrying out brutal massacres of Christians.
The issue for South Africans today is whether they continue to affirm the vision of all the main political movements in the struggle against apartheid, and for which Nelson Mandela (educated as a Christian at Healdtown Methodist school in the Eastern Cape), Ahmed Kathrada (who received a normal Muslim education in the former western Transvaal as a young boy) and Denis Goldberg (from an Ashkenazi Jewish family deriving from the former Russian empire) faced the death penalty in the Rivonia trial in 1963/64 and for which they were sentenced to life in prison.
In the same way, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe expressed a vision of unity in his inaugural speech at the founding of the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959, when he said: “We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.”
There is no criterion here for the supremacy of any one religion over others, as a form of religious apartheid. In the same way, the preamble to the South African constitution states that South Africa “belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity,” so as to create a “democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.”
By contrast, article 6 of the Hamas Charter states its goal as follows: “The Islamic Resistance Movement … owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. Only under the shadow of Islam could the members of all regions coexist in safety and security for their lives, properties and rights.”
Note this: in opposition to the vision of African unity in the struggle against apartheid, the charter of Hamas states that “members of all regions” will coexist in safety under Islam – not, all religions.
A new apartheid is proposed, not its abolition.
The fathers of African liberation – Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Nelson Mandela – would be horrified at this division of humanity into jihadi Sunni Muslim versus all the rest, asserted with modern weapons by Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and Hamas.
How can this not be important?
Paul Trewhela edited MK’s underground newspaper, Freedom Fighter, during the Rivonia Trial, and was a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967. In exile he co-edited the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa
Apartheid Sharia in Gaza and Africa
What makes it impossible for Israel to reach a stable accommodation with Hamas is that Hamas’s global programme of jihad refuses on principle to make accommodation with Israel.
On principle, its ideology is one of war of conquest. Like all the very many other territories conquered under Koranic jihad in the past 1400 years, Israel is regarded by the Muslim Brothers – with Hamas its Palestinian wing – as belonging to the Waqf: territory permanently and unconditionally subject to Islamic rule under Sharia law.
The same applies to northern India, to Spain and Portugal, to Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece in eastern Europe, and to Georgia, the Crimea and other regions of the Caucasus in the former Soviet Union (before that, the Russian empire) – all previously under Muslim rule, following conquest by jihad.
Though forgotten equally by the West and by the former Soviet Union during the last century, jihad has been a norm of world history for 14 centuries, as it now reveals itself again.
No territory once conquered by Muslims is regarded by Hamas and its fellow-thinkers as not under obligation to be returned to Muslim rule.
By the nature of Sharia law, as asserted by Hamas, Islamic government must have an “apartheid” character, in so far as there must be no democracy and no equal citizenship.
Unless they convert to Islam, and in so far as they are permitted to survive, Jews and Christians as “People of the Book” are to be subject permanently to second class status as dhimmi, required to pay a special apartheid tax (jizya) and prohibited from exercising various normal civic functions available to Muslims.
In this way, apologists for Hamas turn the “apartheid state” argument on its head. They obscure the reality that second-class status for non-Muslims of an apartheid type is intrinsic to rule by Sharia, which Hamas makes plain it intends for Israel.
The situation is even worse in this ideology for people who are not monotheists, such as believers in traditional African religions, or Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and the Yazidis of northern Iraq, who are classified as kuffar, or infidels.
No fate is bad enough for kuffar, the Arabic word for “unbelievers” (gavour, in Turkish). This is the origin of the swearword “kaffir” in South Africa, which derives from Islamic enslavers of people in east Africa going back as early as the 7th century.
In the same way, the capture and enslavement of schoolgirls by Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria – repeated in northern Iraq with the capture of Yazidi and Christian women by the Islamic State, or Caliphate – is a form of sex slavery either for money-raising and/or the sexual satisfaction of soldiers, and is justified as Jihad al-Niqah (jihadi marriage).
In its treatment of women, it is the most brutal of forms of sexual apartheid.
What is now very difficult for many South Africans to grasp is that the state system of the Middle East is rapidly breaking down as very old religious divisions threaten to replace mainly secular state boundaries imposed in the colonial period.
The Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, with its secularist, materialist and atheist ethos, had an enormous effect on (Sunni Muslim) Turkey after World War 1, along with the influence of parliamentary, capitalist Britain, France and the United States (the victor powers), with long-lasting effects on Muslim countries throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
Following the defeat of the Turkish Ottoman empire in the war, the military leader Kemal Ataturk carried out a profound secularising – though not socialist – revolution in Turkey, abolishing the Sunni Islamic Caliphate in 1924.
The Caliphate (or Khalifat Allah, meaning Caliph – deputy – of God) had ruled almost without interruption in Sunni Islamic territories for almost 13 centuries through successive Muslim dynasties based in different lands, since the death of the prophet Mohammed in 632.
Ataturk established Turkey as a secular state, unlike the former Ottoman empire in which political power had been identical with the religious leader, the Sultan, as Caliph, the deputy of God.
The written script of the Turkish language was changed from Arabic to the Roman alphabet, men were required to shave off their Muslim beards and women encouraged to remove the veil from their heads.
When de-colonisation swept through Muslim countries after World War 2, newly independent countries with an entirely or mainly Muslim population such as Pakistan and Indonesia in the east to Libya in the west assumed a similar form of government (usually republican), though not going as far as Ataturk in removing traditional forms of dress and Arabic or Arabic-derived script. The new political elites often looked very much to the Soviet Union for political and military support, strengthening the secularising current in political and intellectual life.
The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 very much weakened that former dominant current in many Muslim countries.
The ethos of national liberation – the main theme in Soviet propaganda, and in political and military support for former colonial Muslim countries – has given way increasingly in these countries to the much older priorities of Islam as a political religion, with no separation between church and state in its sacred book.
Among the Palestinians of Gaza, a national movement, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) with its military wing, al-Fatah, were ousted by the Islamic jihadi movement, Hamas, the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
The PLO, with Christian as well as Muslim members, and firm relations with anti-Zionist Jews, was replaced in Gaza by an organisation ideologically holding the same global perspective as the Islamic Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya, all of them carrying out brutal massacres of Christians.
The issue for South Africans today is whether they continue to affirm the vision of all the main political movements in the struggle against apartheid, and for which Nelson Mandela (educated as a Christian at Healdtown Methodist school in the Eastern Cape), Ahmed Kathrada (who received a normal Muslim education in the former western Transvaal as a young boy) and Denis Goldberg (from an Ashkenazi Jewish family deriving from the former Russian empire) faced the death penalty in the Rivonia trial in 1963/64 and for which they were sentenced to life in prison.
In the same way, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe expressed a vision of unity in his inaugural speech at the founding of the Pan Africanist Congress in April 1959, when he said: “We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans, for the Africans, with everybody who owes his only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as an African.”
There is no criterion here for the supremacy of any one religion over others, as a form of religious apartheid. In the same way, the preamble to the South African constitution states that South Africa “belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity,” so as to create a “democratic and open society in which government is based on the will of the people and every citizen is equally protected by law.”
By contrast, article 6 of the Hamas Charter states its goal as follows: “The Islamic Resistance Movement … owes its loyalty to Allah, derives from Islam its way of life and strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine. Only under the shadow of Islam could the members of all regions coexist in safety and security for their lives, properties and rights.”
Note this: in opposition to the vision of African unity in the struggle against apartheid, the charter of Hamas states that “members of all regions” will coexist in safety under Islam – not, all religions.
A new apartheid is proposed, not its abolition.
The fathers of African liberation – Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Nelson Mandela – would be horrified at this division of humanity into jihadi Sunni Muslim versus all the rest, asserted with modern weapons by Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and Hamas.
How can this not be important?
Paul Trewhela edited MK’s underground newspaper, Freedom Fighter, during the Rivonia Trial, and was a political prisoner from 1964 to 1967. In exile he co-edited the banned journal, Searchlight South Africa
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