There’s a Muslim phrase you need to know if you’re going to understand the war in Gaza and Israel. It’s a phrase that militant Islamic Jihadists have used from Chechnya to Lebanon:
“We love death more than you love life.”
Keep that in mind as you watch the latest news on the Israel-Hamas war.
Israel has vowed “to demolish” Hamas, to render the organization incapable of any more barbaric attacks like the one that decapitated babies, raped women and girls, burned people alive, killed 1,400 Israeli citizens, and took 199 hostages on October 7th.
Israel has been bombing Hamas facilities in Gaza ever since. And Hamas and its fellow terrorist group Islamic Jihad have been raining rockets on civilians in Israel.
Meanwhile, on Monday October 16th it was announced that Joe Biden would brave the rockets and would fly to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s war cabinet.
Then Biden would travel to Jordan to meet with Jordan’s king, with Egypt’s President and with the head of the Palestinian Authority to reduce the odds that the war, a war started by Hamas, would spread to the entire Middle East.
But one day after this announcement, Tuesday October 17, the precise day before Biden was due to touch down in Israel, the parking lot of the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City blew up.
This was exactly what Hamas was hoping for. Within minutes of the bombing, Hamas blamed the loss of what it claimed were 500 lives on an Israeli bomb. And that claim was echoed as truth all over the world.
However Israel kept quiet. It analyzed the data. And roughly 24 hours later, Israel concluded that the explosion had been caused by a rocket from the terror group Islamic Jihad, a rocket that had failed early in its flight and had exploded, as you know, in the parking lot of the hospital.
Unfortunately that parking lot was where hundreds of civilians fleeing the bombing had set up camp. Which is why so many people were killed.
The nature of the explosion was one indication that this was a Muslim missile. The explosion began with a burst of flame roughly twelve feet high. It was the kind of blast that would be made by a rocket that had only gone a short distance, was still full of fuel, and had blown up not just the warhead’s explosives, but the fuel itself.
Experts were able to show this in cellphone videos of the explosion.
Then there was the fact that the explosion did not dig a crater, something a bomb from the Israelis would have done. And there was Israel’s ability to pinpoint the location from which the rocket had been launched—a cemetery near the hospital.
What’s more, there was an intercepted conversation between two Hamas members discussing the damage the Islamic Jihad rocket had inflicted.
Israel explained that roughly a third of the thousands of rockets Hamas and Jihad fire fail and fall on Palestinians.
In addition, the explosion of a hospital was the last thing Israel would want on the day before the President of the United States was about to visit.
Roughly twelve hours after the Israeli analysis pointed to Islamic Jihad, America’s intelligence agencies concluded an analysis of their own and agreed that the explosion was caused by a failed rocket from Islamic Jihad.
But the focus on the hospital explosion did exactly what Hamas wanted it to do. It helped Hamas turn the world against Israel.
It also lead to the cancellation of Joe Biden’s meeting with Arab leaders.
Meanwhile, early Wednesday morning, October 18th, Joe Biden arrived in Tel Aviv and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s war cabinet.
Biden was disturbed by a problem. Israel had stopped all humanitarian aid to Gaza until Hamas releases its 199 hostages. However, thanks to Biden’s intercession, Israel changed its mind and Egypt agreed to let twenty trucks of humanitarian aid through its passage into Gaza, the Rafah Border Crossing.
The condition is that none of this aid goes to Hamas. That will be a difficult condition to meet. In the past, Hamas has grabbed relief supplies meant for civilians and used them to feed its terrorists.
Meanwhile, Hamas is telling Gaza City’s citizens not to escape to the south. There’s a reason. Hamas has built 311 miles of military tunnels under Gaza City. Yes, 311 miles of concrete tunnels. Under civilian homes. And Hamas stores its ammunition in schools, mosques, and, hospitals. Why?
To use civilians as human shields. To make sure that if Israel bombs Hamas targets, civilians will die. And the deaths of those civilians will be victories for Hamas. They will be used as propaganda, to demonize Israel.
Remember, the militant Islamic mantra, “we love death more than you love life.”
References:
RANDALL G. ROGAN, Quest for Immortality: An Analysis of ISIS’s Dabiq, International Journal of Communication, 13(2019), 5080-5099
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Howard Bloom, The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought you ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, Feral House, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/world/middleeast/gaza-hospital-israel-hamas-explained.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/17/world/middleeast/islamic-jihad-gaza-hospital-israel.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/10/17/president-visits-war-zones-biden/
https://abc7chicago.com/news-israel-war-palestine-hamas/13921958/
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/politics/joe-biden-israel-visit/index.html
reuters.com/world/biden-lands-israel-consult-gaza-war-2023-10-18/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_Border_Crossing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/18/gaza-humanitarian-aid-entry-israel-netanyahu-biden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_tunnel_warfare_in_the_Gaza_Strip
Moss, Michael, and Souad Mekhennet. “The guidebook for taking a life.” New York Times 10 (2007). http://www-personal.umich.edu/~cdunlop/Phl385/jihad.pdf
Hassan, Nasra. “An arsenal of believers.” The New Yorker 19 (2001): 1-34.
Sveinung Sandberg, Sarah Colvin, ‘ISIS is not Islam’: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance, The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 60, Issue 6, November 2020, Pages 1585–1605, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa035
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.