It may seem like an absurd question, but I recently participated in a FrontPage symposium about an article by Fawaz Gerges in The Nation about how Hamas was doing just that. Here is an excerpt:
In a recent article in The Nation, titled “The Transformation of Hamas,” Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges argues that Hamas is ready to accept Israel and to become a moderate and democratic force if it is engaged properly by the U.S. and the West.
What reality is there to this proposition? Today Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss the supposed “transformation” of Hamas. Our guests are:
Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.
P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva, Israel, and a frequent contributor to Frontpagemag.com and Pajamas Media.
and
Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran. He is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America.
[Editorial note: I emailed Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges several times to invite him to join this discussion, but my invitations went unanswered.]
FP: Kenneth Levin, David Hornik and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Kenneth Levin, tell us your thoughts on Prof. Fawaz A. Gerges’s article. Is Hamas truly ready to embrace Israelis? This means they are ready to abolish Article 11 of their Charter, which is the sole purpose for their existence. This is a bit confusing. What’s your angle?
Levin: Thanks Jamie.
Gerges’s article is simply pro-Hamas propaganda; it is shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda. Unfortunately, this has become standard fare for pieces touching on Israel in the pages of The Nation.
The Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel’s annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter’s declarations. Just recently, senior Hamas figure Osama Abu Khaled shot down claims of any moderating of the organization’s goals and asserted that its objective remains Israel’s destruction. In addition, Hamas-controlled schools and children’s television continue to indoctrinate their young audience in the virtues of devoting themselves to the murder of Jews.
Gerges supports his stance by citing Hamas statements in the vein of being prepared to accept an Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. But Hamas leaders have repeatedly explained that they view any such “acceptance” as an interim step on the path to eliminating Israel. The same is true with regard to Hamas’s willingness to enter into truces. While Gerges asserts that this too is evidence of the organization’s “moderating,” Hamas has made clear that it views truces as vehicles to facilitate its strengthening its own forces until it is in a better position to pursue Israel’s annihilation.
In expounding his thesis, Gerges makes much of other indirect “evidence” as well, “evidence” as meaningless as the examples cited.
Among his other claims, Gerges asserts that the task of governing Gaza and satisfying the needs of its people is one of the factors pushing Hamas to moderation. This has for almost a century been a recurrent – and empty – line of argument proffered by apologists for despotic, murderous regimes. Many were the voices in 1933 that declared Hitler’s rise to the position of chancellor in Germany and his need to govern the nation would inevitably push him to moderate his murderous objectives.
In a similar vein, Gerges cites Hamas’s violent confrontations with other Islamist groups in Gaza as additional evidence of its moderation. Of course, these confrontations are no more than struggles for dominance among competing parties.
After the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when Hitler, apparently fearing a potentially competing power base, had Ernst Roehm and other leaders of the Nazi Sturm Abteilung, the SA, murdered, numerous voices in the West chose to interpret the move as Hitler’s eliminating Nazi extremists and as evidence of his own moderating.
Having established, to his apparent satisfaction, Hamas’s “political evolution and deepening moderation,” Gerges then gets to his predictable conclusion: The real problem is not Hamas and its genocidal agenda but Israel – which, Gerges suggests, is the true “hardline” and “extremist” party in the conflict. The key obstacle to peace is Israel and its refusal to make the concessions that would free Hamas to go public with its new moderation and allow it to follow its heart and abandon more explicitly its goal of killing all Jews.
This is what passes for serious discourse on the Israeli-Arab conflict in The Nation and likeminded anti-Israel outlets.
FP: Robert Spencer, what do you make of Gerges’s article and Kenneth Levin’s comments? And I would like you to expand on this idea that Hamas would or could somehow stray from Islamic orthodoxy regarding Jews and territories that are considered to belong to the House of Islam.
Spencer: Jamie, Kenneth Levin is entirely correct, and his observations are important. Gerges’s article is indeed, as Levin says, “simply pro-Hamas propaganda…shilling for a murderous organization dedicated to an explicitly genocidal agenda.” And it is crucial to bear in mind that “the Hamas charter that you mention not only calls for Israel’s annihilation but asserts the killing of all Jews to be a religious duty, and Hamas leaders continually reiterate their eternal fealty to the charter’s declarations.”
Of course, in contrast to this, Gerges insists that “there are unmistakable signs that the religiously based radical movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel.” But not even Gerges could bring himself to assert that there have been any signs at all, subtle or not, that Hamas has changed its uncompromising posture on Islam, and that makes all the difference. For as long as Hamas remains a group committed to what it regards as Islamic purity, it also remains committed to the Islamic principle that land that is considered to have once belonged to the dar al-Islam belongs by right to the dar al-Islam forever. It remains committed to the idea that, as the twentieth-century Pakistani jihad theorist Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi put it, non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”
This means that if Hamas remains an Islamic group, it remains committed to the destruction of Israel. The strategy that Hamas may pursue in order to attain this goal may change enough to deceive Fawaz Gerges or, if he is in on the joke, then the readers of The Nation, but the goal remains the same.
It is also important to note in light of Gerges’ article that Hamas also, insofar as it continues to be an Islamic religious party, also believes in the acceptability of deceiving unbelievers, particularly in wartime. This is based on a hadith in which Muhammad says that lying is permissible in war, and others in which he says “war is deceit.” Also, Qur’an 3:28 warns Muslims not to take unbelievers as “friends or helpers” (َأَوْلÙيَا — a word that means more than casual friendship, but something like alliance), “unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them.” This is a foundation of the idea that believers may legitimately deceive unbelievers when under pressure. The word used for “guard” in the Arabic is tuqÄtan (تÙقَاةً), the verbal noun from taqiyyatan — hence the increasingly familiar term taqiyya. Ibn Kathir says that the phrase given above as “unless (it be) that ye but guard yourselves against them” means that “believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers” may “show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly. For instance, Al-Bukhari recorded that Abu Ad-Darda’ said, ‘We smile in the face of some people although our hearts curse them.’ Al-Bukhari said that Al-Hasan said, ‘The Tuqyah [taqiyya] is allowed until the Day of Resurrection.'”
While many Muslim spokesmen today maintain that taqiyya is solely a Shi’ite doctrine, shunned by Sunnis, the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher points out that while it was formulated by Shi’ites, “it is accepted as legitimate by other Muslims as well, on the authority of Qur’an 3:28.” The Sunnis of Al-Qaeda practice it today.
It is much more likely that Hamas is practicing taqiyya in appearing to accept the existence of Israel and being willing to negotiate, than that they have actually abandoned Islamic doctrine on these matters.
FP: Thank you Robert Spencer.
There is much more. Read it all.