At the time of writing, 3,793 Palestinians have been murdered, including over 1,500 Palestinian children, and 12,500 wounded. The morally bankrupt Zionist entity continues to pound Gaza’s population, employing the Dahiya Doctrine of state terrorism. Under the fog of this brutality, Palestinians in the West Bank are also being sniped and terrorised.
Brazen propaganda
Coterminous with these extraordinary levels of violence is the brazen propaganda and lies from the Zionist entity. These include but are certainly not limited to the following:
- Hamas slaughtered civilians at a rave. This narrative been strongly disputed, with evidence from those captured suggesting there was a crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers. There is no credible evidence to prove Hamas deliberately targeted civilians.
- Hamas raped victims. The claims remain unsubstantiated.
- Hamas killed 40 babies and decapitated them. This claim was made by Israeli media. It remains unsubstantiated (see here and here)
- Hamas has called for a “Global Day of Jihad”. Right-wing lawmakers in the US have made the claim. It is false.
- Hamas placed babies in cages. The footage turned out to be of Palestinian children held in cages by Israelis.
- Hamas has burned babies alive. Whilst several experts have debunked the notion that the image of the charred baby is AI-generated, Israel did not “give any context for the images or the circumstances of the death of these children.” The ascription to Hamas as a deliberate act is unsubstantiated. Jewish settlers are known to burn babies, however.
- Hamas went door to door, slaughtering people. The footage turned out to be Israeli police.
- American-Israeli lawyer and Republican official Mark Zell posted a video claiming to show a Jewish baby kidnapped by a “Hamas terrorist”. The footage was unrelated to Gaza.
- Hananya Naftali, Netanyahu’s digital aide, claimed Hamas leadership are enjoying good lives whilst Palestinians suffer. However, the images shared are AI-generated:
- Al-Ahli Arab Hospital Attack. Naftali initially posted that Israel bombed the hospital before deleting his tweet. Israel blamed Islamic Jihad for shooting a misfired rocket. However, the footage it shared had a timestamp that showed the footage had been recorded 40 minutes after the explosion. Analysis of the Israeli footage revealed that it had been cropped and flipped to suggest the rocket that hit the hospital came from the direction of Palestinian rocket fire (see also here). The Israeli army also released a video with a recording of a conversation between purported Hamas officials, where they appear to talk about the misfired rocket that had caused the hospital blast. This clip, too, has been debunked. Other independent analyses expose holes in the Zionist narrative (see here and here). Most notably, the Anglican Archbishop Hosam Naoum said the hospital had received “specific warnings” by phone three consecutive days before the bombing to “evacuate the hospital”.
The Zionist approach has clearly been to throw whatever outrageous claim they can, hoping some of it will stick. Meanwhile, they can perpetrate a mass killing of Palestinians.
An immoral equivalence
Perhaps one of the most egregious spins in this event is framing the conflict as though two equal sides are engaged in battle. Hamas is framed as the aggressor with its offensive on the 7th of October, with much outrage expressed concerning the alleged deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians.
However, the two sides are quintessentially not equal.
We do not need to highlight the occupied/occupier status. Nor do we need to revisit the Nakba to understand the last-ditch effort to bring the matter to the fore. For several years, the Zionist state and the UAE have been working hand in glove to normalise Israeli-Arab relations. Saudi was the final piece in that treacherous puzzle, and it was apparent that Mohammed Bin Salman could not care less about Palestine. The effect of these deals was a perfidious abandonment of the Palestinians, leaving them hostage to a psychotic and murderous terrorist state.
Further exacerbating these issues on the same timeline, we observed the ongoing expansion of illegal settlements, forced Palestinian evictions, cultural erasure, frequent incidents of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians, acts of terrorism by Jewish settlers with impunity, and the detention of countless Palestinians. This year alone has seen 247 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Most painfully, since the Arab-Israeli deals, there has been an increase in the frequency of Jewish settler desecrations of Masjid Al-Aqsa, signifying its impending destruction to make for the Temple Mount. (For references, see here).
We cannot excise this context in our discussions on current events in the region. Indeed, the Hamas commander Saleh al-Arouri gave these reasons for the offensive.
It is telling that none of the other Palestinian factions have condemned Hamas, perhaps because they know this context and are living it every day. Pertinent here are the words of the PLO member Dr Hanan Ashrawi. Having questioned the assumed motivation of Hamas to kill as many civilians as possible intentionally, she responds to the assertion that the attack was a deliberate act of mass murder:
“This was a deliberate act of resisting an occupation army that has been surrounding Gaza, besieging Gaza, regularly bombing and shelling Gaza… This [killing of families] has been happening to Palestinians for decades. Where is your moral outrage? Why is it that you always ask the Palestinians to prove their moral fibre? Why is it that you extract whatever happened and you deal with it only by accusing the Palestinians.”
Ashrawi explains that the October 7th offensive was an attempt to resist occupation, and the loss of life cannot be isolated from the oppressive context that has led up to this flashpoint. Note these are not the words of a Hamas spokesperson.
In the vernacular of International Law, the Palestinian resistance engaged in a reprisal against an occupying power. Given the hypocritical outrage of the allegedly purposeful killing of civilians, it is worth noting that under the UK’s Law of Armed Conflict manual, the UK reserves itself the right to “take proportionate reprisals against an enemy’s civilian population or civilian objects where the enemy has attacked our own civilians or civilian objects.” Despite the deliberate targeting of civilians, it is not interpreted as terrorism.
Hamas has claimed it targeted military bases and compounds and issued orders to avoid targeting civilians. But civilians have been killed. Why, how, and in what circumstances these deaths have occurred is difficult to ascertain, given the rampant Zionist propaganda and uncertainty. If Hamas has violated the laws of the Shari’a and killed men, women and children without reason, then their actions are morally wrong and condemnable.
However, given the context, there is still no moral equivalence between the actions of the Palestinian resistance and the historical and present barbarism of the Zionist occupier. To perpetuate a neutrality of equal sides in this war is to accede to the validity of Zionist propaganda.
UK Imam’s statement and the “we condemn” ritual
Despite this clear distinction, some Muslims felt the need to drop to their knees and perform the “we condemn” ritual in a statement published on the 18th of October.
The statement reads terribly, excising history, context, and the aspirations of the Palestinian resistance. It does not begin by condemning the brutal occupation and continued theft of Palestinian land or the context highlighted above. It even fails to mention the transgressions against Masjid Al-Aqsa and the killings in West Bank.
Instead, the statement suspends its judgement on the shelling of the Al Ahli Arab hospital despite mounting evidence. It further “denounces” Hamas’s “killing and abduction” first and frames Israel’s barbaric and bloodthirsty actions as “subsequent excessive force”. It quickly moves to condemn anti-Semitism but fails to denounce the racism inherent in the state-backed censorship and repression of pro-Palestinian activism in schools and streets. Instead, it more passively “affirms” the right of communities to show their solidarity and support for both Palestinians and Israelis caught up in this conflict. Of course, nothing is mentioned concerning “support” and “solidarity” shown by the 100 or so dual-national Israelis who have travelled from Britain to Israel to contribute to the murdering of Palestinians.
All this has been noted by the pro-Israeli media, which has taken advantage by declaring that “UK Muslim clerics condemn Hamas”. The statement undermines the Palestinian resistance. It is an embarrassment.
The signatories
This sedated pandering to the pro-Israel lobby is unsurprising given the signatories.
Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra has continued the trend of solidifying his status as an Establishment scholar and placating the Government through questionable interfaith efforts, attendances at Westminster Abbey, and supplications for the Muslim-blood-stained Royal family.
Abdullah Sahin is an academic who believes the “heart of the problem” of radicalisation and “Islamic extremism” is the “uncritical transmission of a revered set of texts” and “an indoctrinatory approach to learning and teaching about Islam”. In other words, madrassa-style education leads to “extremism” – an implication reinforcing neocon tropes and cliches. Brainwashing children with Sahin’s ideas is the cure to the problem of “extremism”.
Then we have the usual coterie of counter-extremists and “Imams in Line” Imams who are directly or indirectly linked to Shaukat Warraich’s dubious network of counter-extremism organisations. As we have shown, Warraich’s organisation, such as Faith Associates, has a history of receiving PREVENT money and secretly pushing and promoting PREVENT logic and thinking to unsuspecting Muslim institutions and audiences. Over the years, it has engaged with neoconservative counter-extremism organisations and advocated deformist views whilst courting traditional scholars. Most disturbingly, it has even worked with pro-Israel organisations such as the Mossad-linked Community Security Trust. Full details can be found here.
The following names are connected to this network.
Qari Asim is the senior editor for Warraich’s Imams Online counter-extremism project. He is also a trustee of British Future, which has collaborated with another deformist organisation, New Horizons for British Islam, to fracture the Muslim identity and reconstitute it into a new nationalist form in line with the PREVENT agenda where Muslim history is reduced to serving colonialism. Despite toeing the government line and even encouraging Muslims to join the British Army, he was unceremoniously kicked to the side by neocon Michael Gove last year when he supported activists protesting the inflammatory Lady of Heaven movie.
Musharraf Hussain is a ritual condemner and contributor to Imams Online. He has advised the Government on radicalisation in the past. His Karimia Institute website carries a statement that confirms it received PREVENT money. The statement also affirms that Hussain’s institution carries out counter-extremism and deradicalization efforts:
“Our focus was on promoting positive youth development, tackling extremism and extremist narrative and improving community relations.”
It is worth noting that Hussain was mentioned in the Shawcross Review of Prevent for some pro-Palestinian statements and criticisms of Prevent (here, p.31). According to a report attacking Musharraf at the time, his institute is estimated to have received almost £200,000 of Prevent money over the past decade.
Imam Muhammad Munir is a listed scholar at Hussain’s Karimia Institute.
Mufti Faiz Rasool has worked as a mufti in Minhaj-ul-Quran London. He has spoken at their counter-terrorism and extremism events. Minhaj-ul-Quran and its leader Shaykh Tahir-ul-Qadri have a history of promoting PREVENT-like agendas and measures supported by the Quilliam Foundation and anti-Islam neocon Douglas Murray. For more details, see here.
Shaykh Masood Akhtar Hazarvi is also associated with Imams Online (here and here). Despite criticising PREVENT, his Al Hira Islamic centre has given “anti-ISIS” training to children as young as 11.
Imam Ijaz Shaami, Imam Zeeshan Baloch, and Shaykh Umar Hayat Qadri are linked to Imams Online (see, for example, here and here). When Qari Asim was sacked as a government advisor by Michael Gove, Imam Baloch and Shaykh Qadri (as well as Shaykh Masood Akhtar Hazarvi) came to the defence of the lackey, laughably invoking “British values” and arguing that he has a “strong track record of standing up against hatred and extremism”.
Shia scholars Shaykh Arif Abdul Hussain and Ali Reza Bhojani are associated with the Al Mahdi Institute. Hussain has spoken at Birmingham Central Mosque alongside the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit on terrorism and Syria. He reinforced the idea that the terrorism “problem” was a “Muslim problem”, demonising the Muslim identity in the process. His institute also held a public discussion on “Exploring Extremism in Society”, hosting the pro-PREVENT deformist feminist Shaista Gohir (more on Gohir, here and here).
Shaykh Khalifa Ezzat is the chief Imam of the London Central Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre (ICC). The centre became infamous last year for becoming a conduit for the “British Islam” project, singing “God Save the King”. It has held several counter-extremism events. In 2016, as part of their interfaith activity, the centre held a Counter Extremism Strategy round table meeting with the Head of Local Delivery for The Office of Counter-Extremism and a representative of the Home Office as chief guest. The event aligns with the Home Office’s Building a Stronger Britain Together programme formed under the Government’s 2015 Counter Extremism Strategy. Shaykh Ezzat also spoke at this event. In 2017, the ICC worked with the Home Office to roll out the misleading reframing of counter-extremism as safeguarding. Two years later, it held a meeting with the London Prevent Lead “to share ideas, best practice, and engage with communities”.
Shockingly, earlier this week, the ICC even opened its doors to pro-Israel MPs, who have given their unflinching support to Israel and promoted fake news concerning the Palestinian resistance.
Finally, it is disturbing, though not surprising, to see Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad put his name to such an atrocious statement. In the past, he has pushed his “English Islam” at the expense of other Muslim groups at events organised by deformists. Par for the course?
Concluding Remarks
It is no secret that the internal desire within Israel is to bomb the Palestinians into the south of Gaza and expel them to North Sinai, “cleansing” Gaza and annexing it to Israel.
Against this overarching agenda, the slaughter of Palestinians, and the mass disinformation campaign against the Palestinian resistance, “equalising” or “neutral” Muslim statements are grossly irresponsible and fall into the propaganda campaign of the terrorist state of Israel and its proxies here in the West.
They are knives gently slipped into the backs of Palestinians.
May Allāh ease the suffering of the oppressed and innocent and grant victory to the Palestinians. Āmīn.
“If you are suffering, they too are suffering. But you can hope to receive from Allāh what they can never hope for.” (Al-Qurʾān, 4:104)
CoolnessofHind 