Good morning,
In light of the Hamas invasion of Israel, this week we will look at groups who tried and failed to exterminate the Jewish people. Then focus on why Israel has a God given claim to the land.
Today, we will look at HAMAS. When they invaded Israel on 7 October, 2023, they killed, raped, pillaged, and to death God’s chosen people, Israel. Their violence was pure evil. The messengers of Satan.
Hamas
The Hamas massacre that took place over the weekend was not the result of decades of “occupation.” Israel left Gaza in 2005, uprooting families and wrenching the country into an impassioned debate along the way. Not a settler, nor single IDF soldier, nor any type of Israeli personnel has remained in the Gaza Strip.
No, this massacre was a function of hate—the kind of toxic intolerance in its purest form.
It was years in the making, and just as it took sophisticated military and logistical planning, it also took years of ideological planting—sowing seeds of antisemitism. Indeed, one cannot look at what Hamas did without understanding their thinking about Jews.
Hamas and its co-conspirators in the Muslim world had been vilifying Jews for decades, starting with their founding charter, which is full of antisemitic bile. They constructed an entire architecture of antisemitism that spanned the world and spanned spheres from academia to religion, politics and culture. There were many people who should have been pushing for a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but instead had adopted an ideology of hate that did not see Jews as worthy of a piece of land or even as equal contestants in a historical struggle. It saw them as subhuman.
From the pulpits of mosques to the pages of op-eds to the stands of bookstores across the Arab world, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and other timeless fictions and hateful works were peddled, updated, and perfected to the point that large swathes of the public stopped seeing Zionists or Israelis or Jews as human long ago. School children are taught to hate Israel, Jews are demonized as part of official curriculum, and “summer camps” involve learning how to fire automatic weapons and kidnap Israelis.
And this is how the massacre took place.
A world in which you see an entire tribe of people as lesser—as roaches, as vermin—this is how you justify gunning down hundreds of unarmed teenagers at a concert, how you rationalize men going house to house and murdering parents at point blank range in front of their children, how you legitimize intentionally setting houses on fire with infirm, elderly people trapped inside, unable to escape; how you explain kidnapping toddlers still not old enough to speak and mocking them in front of the camera; how you excuse desecrating corpses, stepping on their faces while grinning for the camera.
This is not normal, not by any standards.
However, it is normal in a historical context. There have been other times over the centuries where one people saw the other as anything but human. From Europeans and American slave traders who enslaved the people of an entire continent, to genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, and, of course, in Nazi Germany. (Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League)
Hamas will not succeed. God has the nation of Israel’s back.
Tom Stearns, WASI Chaplain, 907 715-4001 chaplain@alaskaseniors.com
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