In a fascinating and trenchant dialogue, British author Douglas Murray interviewed the son of a Hamas co-founder. Mosab Hassan Yousef, who worked with Israeli intelligence to foil numerous suicide bombing attacks against Israel.
When Murray asked what Youisef was taught growing up, he replied, “Jewish hatred, this is not a secret thing. Hatred toward the Jewish people, toward the infidels, towards the Christians; it’s part of the Islamic common teaching. … It’s in the air; it’s in the book (Koran), it’s in the mosque; it’s in the school, and people think it is normal just to preach hatred towards other people because they are different or because they don’t agree with Islamic principles.”
Speaking of the atmosphere in which he grew up and how it focused on the eradication of Israel, he said, “It’s not only in Hamas charters, it’s in fact, a desire not only for Palestinian-Islamic movements like Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad … but it’s also the non-Islamist movements that praise Jewish slaughter. And this was the biggest problem that I had in the 90s during the suicide attacks before and after the Second Intifada. People used to celebrate.”
He noted that when a suicide bomber had been successful in massacring Jews, “A majority of the Palestinian population celebrated, praised suicide bombing attacks even though it targeted civilians. … In fact, people would celebrate more when the death toll would be greater, even though we had Arabs, foreigners, who died in those attacks, children, women, elders, all types of people, and this is where from the early beginning I had this moral conflict. How can you celebrate and enjoy the suffering of people like this?”
“At the beginning you think that the Israelis deserve that; ‘They took our land. They killed our people. They are against our God; they want to destroy us.’ You get to a point where you see your enemy down you celebrate that. But then — for how long you can lie to somebody before they start questioning the truth and the reality?” he noted.
He said of his childhood, “From a very early age I had my problem with the culture. I did not like the abuse; I did not appreciate the beating. I did not appreciate the rigid, rough discipline. Don’t expect to beat up a child because they did not follow the religious protocol and this child is not going to question what that was for? … I survived it; many people get broken in the beginning.”
He remembered being in prison in 1996 at the age of 18 because he had purchased guns for the purpose of shooting Israelis. “Thankfully I got arrested before I carried out a terrorist attack, I was not that far. … We had guns and we were looking for targets. … Hamas in prison proved to be barbaric; they killed so many people; they tortured so many people, our own people, for suspicion of collaborating with Israel with no evidence. Hamas did not have evidence. … Dozens were killed in a short period of time. Hundreds were tortured in the worst possible way. This was the time when I started asking the question: What if Hamas succeeds in establishing a Palestinian state? Are they going to do this to our people?”
“One of the things in the Koran, that Allah hates the Jewish people for being disobedient,” he stated. “Hence many of those jihadists think that they are the sword of God on Earth, that they are actually manifesting the punishment against the Jewish people for being disobedient. And this is why I personally question the belief system itself. I thought it was not enough to work in counterterrorism shooting down terrorists or trying to stop a suicide bomber before they reach their target; after 10 years of this operation I came to realize we were fighting a ghost because we did not deal with the belief system.”
Speaking of the October 7 massacre of Israelis by Hamas and how it differed from all the previous terrorist attacks on Israelis, he said, “This one, you see them moving, you see them speaking; you seem them enjoying it. They rejoice in the death of so many innocent, defenseless people. In people’s living rooms, enjoying beverages from their kitchen while the children are mourning the death of their parents next door. There is no human language that can describe the evil that took place on October 7. That’s not just a war crime; it’s not just killing; it’s a genocide by all standards. And to see such a genocide but nobody’s talking about it. … This is not just a terrorist attack.”
He spoke of the West’s refusal to see the Islamist threat:
One of the biggest contributors to terrorism and violence is hypocrites. Because when we are hypocrites we are not calling things for what they are. We see the Islamists’ threat; we see what they are capable of doing, FBI, Homeland Security, other intelligence agencies in the West, most democracies in the West, they know the ideological dimension that motivates terrorists and terrorist attacks. But we prefer not to talk about it because it’s “Islamophobic” or because it’s controversial or we may offend the Muslims. So now we are submitting to intimidation when we don’t talk about it, when we don’t challenge it, that this is not acceptable; it’s not acceptable.
He concluded:
This hatred against the Jews that is attracting many Westerners who might have something in common: that they are all anti-Semites. And this is what’s bringing the Islamists and the Communists and could be the socialists, even, to work together; they have something in common and that is their hatred toward Israel. But what many Westerners are not understanding is that this is not only anti-Israel; it‘s anti-success and it’s anti-civilization. It‘s pro-chaos.