Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Palestinians Embrace Hamas
What will it take for the U.S. and Europe to realize that the Palestinians support Hamas? Two recent polls, taken by Palestinian organizations, verify that despite the ugliness of Hamas’ recent horrific actions (from one poll) and its mismanagement of Gaza, Palestinians still favor their rule. Here’s a summary of the most recent poll:
A public opinion poll published on November 14 showed that 75% of Palestinians support Hamas’s murder spree, including rape and beheadings, as opposed to only 13% who disapprove.
The poll, conducted by the Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD), covered 668 respondents across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
According to the results, 59.3% of the Palestinians expressed ‘extreme support’ for the actions of Hamas on October 7, while 15.7% said they ‘somewhat’ favored the massacre. Fewer than 13% of the Palestinians opposed the massacre.
But if you think the poll only represented Gaza, think again:
The poll also showed that 68% of the Palestinians in the West Bank said they ‘extremely support’ the butchering of Israelis, while another 14.8% said they ‘somewhat’ support it. In total, 87.7% of the Palestinians in the West Bank have a positive sentiment toward Hamas. Only 10.2% of the Palestinians living in the West Bank have a negative sentiment toward Hamas.
To show how deluded the U.S. and Europe are about creating a two-state solution, consider this data:
One month before the Hamas massacre, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research published a poll that showed that 67% of the Palestinian public opposes the idea of a ‘two-state solution’ as opposed to 32% who support it. The poll showed that a majority of 53% of the Palestinians support armed struggle against Israel. Twenty percent said they support negotiations with Israel, while another 24% expressed support for a ‘popular non-violent resistance.’ The poll, in addition, showed that if new presidential elections were held at the time, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would receive 58% of the votes as opposed to 37% for Abbas.
A person can question the veracity of both polls shown here; Arab pollsters are not always reliable in the results they reach. Is AWRAD under the influence of Hamas? Did the pollsters intimidate the respondents to give answers favoring Hamas? These are all questions for which we have no answers.
But this is the data we have to consider. In effect, nothing has changed in attitudes toward Hamas and Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians still hate the Jews. They still desire to drive the Jews into the sea. They want the land all to themselves.
How does Israel, or anyone else, convince Biden and the Europeans that their preferred solution is naïve, deluded and will end in disaster?
In response to how the children are indoctrinated, from cdor below:
.
Published in Islamist Terrorism
I certainly won’t take the numbers as written, but I’m willing to believe that over fifty percent are totally cool with the attack.
Conversely, I am willing to believe that over 20% aren’t.
Well, you are just wrong.
It is understandable, because you are western, and this barbaric way of thinking is alien. Yet, it is there. It is not like anyone is putting a gun to the head of pro terror demonstrators in America. Those are people here. Imagine the increased feelings there.
There are the hadith (follow on rules), and there is the Koran. Many people are confused by the Koran because it is not organized chronologically. So in parts it praised the Jews as you say, and in parts it talks about killing them. Early on Mohammed thought the Jews would join up so he was nice, and when they didn’t he was pretty mad. That’s why you see the mixed messages.
I just don’t know either, Steve. I see both sides: they are lying to save themselves, or they genuinely support Hamas. Mark’s point, that we just need to look at their historic behavior, has merit.
Rape and torture of enemies, or the non-combatant family members of enemies, likely is appropriate, even praiseworthy behavior in some cultures. (We know in some cultures in the past, child sacrifice took place publicly. People watched as the child was brutally murdered on an alter.)
We’ve had hints for the longest time that there’s something definitely different from us on this score about certain Islamic cultures. We tell ourselves, when we get these startling little indications of an outlook totally alien to our values (or anyway, our professed values) that we must have misheard the speaker or misunderstood him or her. Does anyone remember how shocked we were, about 10 years ago, when a Muslim woman who was also a lawyer—I mean we’re talking about someone we saw as an educated, respectable woman—openly called for men in her culture to rape the Israeli girls?
More specifically, Mohammad called upon the Jews to recognize him as a new (and the final) prophet. When the Jews refused to do so, he turned upon them and began preaching genocidal hatred.
Note also that Mohammad “reinterpreted” various parts of the Bible to suit his purposes. Not to mention his “revelations” which granted him privileges to indulge his personal desires. Why Jews and Christians should have welcomed his heresies was left unexplained.
More precisely: The distinction was in the rules of jihad: Conquered peoples were to be given two choices: Conversion to Islam or death. Christians and Jews, as “people of the book”, were to be given an additional third choice: Submission to Muslim rule, in which they would accept being oppressed and exploited and even enslaved–and under the terms of which even the mildest request for moderation of the oppression was a breaking of the agreement and therefore justification for death.
Jews and Christians were legitimate targets of religious wars of conquest. Furthermore, any restrictions upon or objections to Muslim proselytizing, no matter how aggressive, were taken as legitimate provocation for jihad. Of course, Christians and Jews were barred from publicly advocating for the truth and merits of their faiths.
Jews and Christians (especially Jews) were excoriated and demonized in various passages in the Koran and the Hadith, so the claim that Islam honors “the people of the book” is dubious, to put it excruciatingly politely.
That is true to the extent that they accepted Christians and Jews living among them when they were at the peak of their civilization in Spain through the levant. When that crumbled tolerance became a lot less. Probably a combination of the Crusades and the expulsion from Spain and the general deterioration of their empire made them far less tolerant. There is also a tendency among the hoi polloi to be a lot less accepting of differences than the upper classes. Note that there are no Christian churches or synagogues in any of the Muslim countries. When I was in Afghanistan in 1971 there was an Italian family who had a special permit from the king to make wine, but that was about the limit of toleration. Western women were on occasion attacked by groups of men if they were dressed “inappropriately.” There was no Jewish intelligencia as existed in earlier times in Spain and North Africa. All officers of the court were Muslims. That is the rule throughout the Muslim world.
According to traditional Islamic law (and there are four main schools) the testimony of a non-Muslim is worth half that of a Muslim, so you need two non-Muslim witnesses to balance one Muslim. Likewise, the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. (So the testimony of a non-Muslim woman is worth one quarter that of a Muslim man.)
Finally, those non-Muslims need at least one Muslim on their side for their testimony to be accepted in court: The testimony of ten non-Muslims is insufficient without at least one Muslim in addition. Thus, a Muslim can break into a Christian girls’ school and rape and murder at will, but the testimony of every girl is insufficient to convict the rapist. There are numerous documented cases in Egypt of Muslims abducting and raping and enslaving (“converting”) young Christian girls–and doing so with impunity.
I saw a clip of a Palestinian mother whose kid had received a life-saving organ transplant from an Israeli donor and done by Israeli doctors saying that she hoped the boy will grow up to kill Jews and be a martyr. I think a lot of Palestinian kids would be better off as orphans if this is what their depraved parents are teaching.
Money does not improve their lives–they have let an unbroken string of kleptocrats steal it for half a century. They are entirely incapable of stable, sane democratic rule and will instead always defer to demagogues who will remain safe and rich behind the lines in some other country with a good banking system while urging the populace to be martyrs to engender sympathy to release more western cash to preserve the lifestyle of their “leaders.”
Maybe a complete beatdown and the end of the political and educational perversion is what they need. The deaths of some very rich guys would also be salutary.
If Bunker Busters were ok for us, they should be ok to give to Israel.
Yes…
They raised the children to became adults who would do Oct 7. That enough “polling” for me.
There is a rule in Islam I believe that if the later passages of the Koran contradict the earlier, the latter take precedent.
Your key phrase is “ordinary people”. I do not believe that is who we are dealing with at this point.
And, yet, in our current weakened, self-hating culture, we seem to be driven to welcome Muslims with open arms while castigating Israel for simply defending herself. How stupid are these bright young minds in our finest academic institutions? Do they not understand that the Jews are merely in the way as the Islamists march through our entire Western civilization if we allow them?
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/20/al-shifa-hospital-and-the-pathological-distrust-of-israel/
Your point is irrelevant to the question we are discussing.
I don’t think so: There would be justifications and excuses galore.
That is correct: I believe the arabic term, translated to English, is “abrogation”.
The trick would then become, figuring out what is earlier and what is later. Since, as someone mentioned, it’s not chronological.
I think that is well established. I just don’t know it though.
A hasty internet search turns up websites that give that information. Just search for “Koran chronological order”.
Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer and others may have written about this, in conjunction with the problem of abrogation.
@SusanQuinn can I agree with your conclusions without agreeing with this specific bit of evidence?
On the polls: “A person can question the veracity of both polls shown here.”
The polls are questionable. As alluded to in prior posts, in the linked poll many of the questions seem loaded and designed to elicit a particular response. There is also the question of anonymity and retribution. Heck, I am frequently reluctant to answer telephone polls as I don’t trust them to keep it anonymous. Here in the US, the worst that would happen is unsolicited request for donations. There I might get shot or my family denied food or treatment.
On disbelieving and downplaying the atrocities on 10/7: In the following, I am not referring to the psychopaths (mostly marxist) in our midst that lie as a standard operating procedure. Back in the pre-internet 80’s, an ex-navy coworker’s initial reaction to an Iranian airliner being shot down was that the Iranian mullah’s were so evil they shot down their own passenger jet to cause an incident. He was patriotic and strongly motivated to believe our Navy would not do such an appalling thing. After a few days, the US admitted the crew of the Vincennes mistook it for a threat and shot it down. A lot of pro-palestinians are also strongly motivated to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and dismiss it as Israeli propaganda. “Being in denial” is a pretty common human trait and well in evidence online.
I otherwise think I agree with you in that there is no obvious solution within or coming out of the Palestinians. Israel has tried occupation of Gaza and the West bank and then they’ve tried a quasi-two state solution and neither were acceptable. What will happen once Hamas is eliminated is hard to foresee.
“To show how deluded the U.S. and Europe are about creating a two-state solution,…”. This is the state department pretending to be competent. They don’t want to admit they have no answer.
A counter argument to my comment on the polls. In one of the questions , 75% of the respondents said they wanted a “national unity” government other than Hamas or the Palestinian authority. (IE anyone else has to be better than who is ruling us now). Sounds accurate to me.
But as with some in the US rating Biden poorly because they think he’s not leftist ENOUGH, at least some Palestinians might be against Hamas because they think Hamas isn’t bloodthirsty ENOUGH.
I’m not very skeptical of these polls, for they only reinforce what we’ve known for decades by the behavior of the Palestinians. Besides, I don’t think I’ve ever once in my life heard a poll with encouraging results from Palestinians. They’ve always come up with these same answers – they want to wipe out the Jews and they celebrate every terrorist act against them. We don’t really need an electron microscope to detect their intentions. The other abundantly obvious evidence is that all the other Arab countries despise Palestinians more than the Israelis do. They have been literally kicked out of at least three Arab countries that I can think of off-hand.
It is an obscenity to call the piles of dead bodies that area has accrued over the last fifty plus years a ‘peace process’.