MUHARRAM 12, 1430 A.H.
THURSDAY JANUARY 8 2009
Print This Page 
What is the crime of Hamas?
By Abdullah Musa
AS I write, Hamas is being pounded out of existence, while most Arab leaders are busy in motion going nowhere. The world is no longer appalled by the mention of death toll: it is simply a necessary statistic that shows the news agency as being thorough. If statistics of human dead ever shape policies, Iraq could never have been, nor Somalia, nor Darfur.
The Middle Eastern conflict had been going on since the creation of the state of Israel. The logic of the Western world tells them it is normal to create a state for someone by displacing another.
This is what is called preferential treatment: you create a favourable circumstance for someone at the expense of the one whom you do not like. At the expense of being boring, let me tell the reader a personal observation of how preferential treatment works.
We were in secondary school in early 70’s and we were going back from the village to Kano, then to our various schools. The village we were living in then had no paved road to the city only motorable track and as such vehicles were not regularly available. We were lucky to board an official Land Rover, the type with open back covered by tent (as commercial passengers).
Amongst the passengers was a senior brother of mine. We stopped on the way at another village for the driver to fill the back to brim with additional passengers. A commission agent ordered us to disembark in order to make the sitting arrangement ‘better’. My brother was in a secure spot.
Then the agent started to order us in according to his preferences. I got my position back, but my senior brother was left out standing while his ‘seat’ was given to a fellow favoured by the agent. My brother queried the agent as to where he was supposed to sit as the vehicle was now apparently filled to the brim!
The agent replied, ‘oho’! This means in Hausa language I do not know, neither do I care. My brother had to force himself in and sit in a very cramped position throughout the journey! As far as the agent was concerned he had done his job: getting a seat for his favoured client.
The history of the creation of Israel is basically known to anyone who is curious enough to have developed the attitude of listening to radios even in the remotest corner of Africa.
The Palestinians were displaced in order to create a home for the favoured clients of Europeans, the Jews. Sixty years on, the Palestinians are still struggling to regain their homeland, while a disinterested world is busy with its trade, sporting events, and even more recently, the financial and economic meltdown.
The PLO is also a household name. Over this 60-year period, it had tried to reverse the injustice done to its people without success. Yasser Arafat, its longest serving chairman was at the end believed to be assassinated by the Israelis. Somewhere within those years of struggle, Hamas was born. It felt that Israel would never willingly give up the territories it had captured from the Palestinians and other Arabs. We should also remember there were the Arab- Israeli wars from which Israel emerged victorious.
One significant factor in this imbroglio is that the United States of America, the one nation with most destructive arsenal in the world, is the guarantor of Israel. There is nothing any Arab nation will do that will make it acceptable to the US on the same platform as Israel.
America continues to subsidize Israel and to offer it all required military hardware and intelligence. Any enemy to the State of Israel is an enemy to the United States and the client states of Europe.
Today two nations are branded pariahs for their stances against Israel: Syria and Iran. All others have capitulated, with the most demeaning capitulation reserved for the Egyptians.
Israel is occupying a portion of Syria and of recent it bombed a facility in Syria which it said was a nuclear factory. We may recall it undertook such bombing sortie on Iraq during Saddam’s reign.
Saddam Hussein did not reply the bombing, nor did Syria after the latest onslaught. It is thus apparent, as it had all along been apparent, that Israel is in the Middle East to police the Arabs for the Western world. The reasons are basically two: religion and race.
Israelis are not Christians, and they are not of the same genetic make-up with the Europeans; the dictionary says that they are of the same descent as the Arabs.
If Christianity is a religion of worshipping one God, and obeying His laws, then Anglo-Saxons are not Christians, for they want to obliterate God’s laws, and their Churches are sometimes sold for lack of patronage.
Zionism seems to share the same world view with the secularists of Europe and America. The Arabs insist on retaining Islam, making it a state religion in many Arab countries.
If you start counting countries that have accepted the status quo of the Palestinian situation, you can start from Morocco, Libya, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai and other satellite nations. Simply put, the world order is that though colonialism is said to be over in paper, the Western world and Israel are the leaders of the world.
Unfortunately for Palestinians the Jews have chosen their country as their home; and they say unequivocally it is a Jewish state. And it is this decree which Hamas refuses to accept. And it is for this reason that its electoral victory was rejected, it was forced to take over Gaza, and for that it suffered economic blockade, which was meant to make sure that their followers rebelled.
The blockade to Gaza is simply what strangulation is to a human being. If you are struggling to free yourself from someone who is trying to cut supply of air to your brain by throttling you, the world of diplomacy will simply say that he should exercise restraint!
Should the reader be reminded of the story of South Africa? The whites conquered the land, established total control on the nation’s resources, and ruled using apartheid as the guiding principle.
When ANC led a struggle and eventually won independence, they were told that henceforth South Africa should be a rainbow nation: not only for the blacks, but for the whites and Indians. How long in stay were the Indians and whites in South Africa?
Yet Israelis who left Israel for more than 2000 years could not accept a rainbow; the Palestinians must either accept their second class citizenship or be exterminated. Those who were expelled earlier during the wars have no right of return: they are stateless.
How was East Timor excised out of Indonesia? This was through intense pressure from the Western powers through the agency of their ‘United Nations.’ Southern Sudan is another interesting example. When the West wanted to tout the success of its one nation-two-systems policy, it got a German brewer to open a factory for the production of lager beer after an absence of 25 years due to Shari’ah!
Muslims are thus not in any confusion about the unGodly goals of Western civilization. They are also in no doubt that racism propels the Westerners to be unjust to any who is not of their make-up. The saddest aspect of it all is the fact that in nearly all Arab countries, those in leadership are not in harmony with the citizens with respect to the ideology that is to be used in governance.
By the time this article reaches the press, (if it does) Hamas leadership might have been exterminated, with Israeli tanks and troops patrolling the streets of Gaza, and the likes of Mahmood Abbas queuing up to take orders.
The Western world has been given power and they use it unjustly. They trample upon the rights of the weak and judge people racially. They don’t believe in the meeting with the Creator of the universe to render accounts of their actions in this world. We do.
Abdullah Musa
Ahmad Nuhu Road,
Sharada, Kano.
