We all know what happened Saturday. Or we think we know.
Gaza fired what it said were 5,000 rockets at civilian targets in Israel.  And Hamas fighters infiltrated Israel using a massive bulldozer to tear a hole in the smart fence draped with razor wire that separates Gaza from southern Israel.
Over 1,500 invaders streamed through. Some of them crossed the barrier on engine-powered paragliders. Some on motorcycles. Some in vehicles disguised as Israeli police cars.
These infiltrators then entered 22 small Israeli communities and went methodically from home to home, butchering the fathers, mothers, and children inside.  In some cases, raping the women. In others, burning their victims alive.  In yet others, blowing families up with grenades.
And, according to one report, beheading forty babies on just one kibbutz.
Not to mention raping and killing 260 Israelis at a peace concert.
The West was horrified by these war crimes.  One survivor said that the Hamas infiltrators seemed to derive joy from this butchery.  They were smiling as they fired grenades and bullets.
What few understood is that these barbarities are the sort of methods that Mohammed himself, the founder of Islam, the man who liked to call himself a Prophet of War, demanded. Mohammed said, â€Å“You must not take hostages until you have made great slaughter in the land.â€ÂÂ
And one member of an al-Qaeda front group just before 9/11 said, â€Å“Allah told us of the certainty of the annihilation of the infidels…by means of the Muslim group, which would, in accordance with the Islamic commandment…torture them…The question now on the agenda is, how is the torture Allah wants done at our hands to be carried out?â€ÂÂ
Yes, Mohammed called not just for mass murder, he called for torture.  Mohammed’s goal was terror.  As ISIS’ online magazine, DÄÂÂbiq, put it, Allah has set his believers the task of â€Å“terrorizing, massacring, and humiliating the enemies of Allah.â€ÂÂ
ISIS adds about Islam’s mass murderers, these killers are â€Å“youths who divorced the world†who â€Å“went to their enemy seeking to be killed in the cause of Allah.â€Â  In the invasion of Israel, 1,500 of these Hamas killers were themselves killed.
Mohammad decreed that those who die killing unbelievers are martyrs.  They get an express ticket to paradise, complete with the 72 virgins you’ve heard about.
But Mohammed was also generous to those who lived. The eighth chapter of the Qur’an is about how to divide up the loot of war. Including the women, who become your sex slaves.
In the last few days you may have seen the video of a Hamas fighter in the back of a pickup truck parading a captured Israeli woman through the streets of Gaza and putting a scarf on her head. That scarf meant he was claiming her as his sex slave.
What’s more, Mohammed had a special place in his heart for Jews. He said â€Å“Whoever of the Jews falls into your hands, kill him.†And, the Day of Judgement â€Å“will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’â€ÂÂ’
But Mohammed’s savagery was not limited to Jews. Said the Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of todays’ Iran, â€Å“Muslims have no alternative… to an armed holy war against profane governments. …Holy war means the conquest of all non-Muslim territories. …It will …be the duty of every able-bodied adult male to volunteer for this war of conquest, the final aim of which is to put Qur’anic law in power from one end of the earth to the other.â€Â This demand for Islamic Holy War and global conquest is written into the Iranian constitution.
Israel has to defeat these holy commands. Remember, it’s not just Hamas who is driven by Mohammed’s words. It’s Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, the Iranian army, Al Shabaab, Boko Haram, al Qaeda, ISIS, and at least a dozen more Islamist groups around the world. It is a small but significant portion of the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims. And it’s Iran itself, which can build nuclear weapons within twelve days.
So Israel has mobilized 360,000 troops. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for the utter destruction of Hamas’ war-making capabilities.   To accomplish that goal, Israeli planes have bombed over 2,000 Gazan buildings used by Hamas.
But when you see the destruction Israel has wrought in Gaza, remember something crucial. Hamas uses civilians as human shields. It places its military operations, its rockets, and its ammunition in hospitals, schools, mosques, and apartment buildings.
It knows that the more civilians killed by Israel’s bombs, the more the world will turn on Israel. And in Hamas’ eyes, there’s another plus. Every civilian who dies in a war with the unbelievers is a martyr and goes directly to paradise.
So for Hamas, the killing of Gaza’s civilians is a win-win deal.
References:
George Sale. The Koran: Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed: Translated Into English Immediately from the original Arabic. J.B. Lipincott Company, 1988.
Sahih Bukhari. Translator: M. Muhsin Khan. MSA-USC Hadith Database, USC-MSA Compendium of Muslim Texts. University of Southern California.
Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini, A Clarification of Questions: An Unabridged Translation of Resaleh Towzih al Masael.  Borujerdi, trans., Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1984.
Ruhollah Khomeini. Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini,Trans. Hamid Algar,  Berkeley, California: Mizan Press, 1981.
Reuh Alleah Khumaynei (Ayatollah Khomeini).  Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini: Political, Philosophical, Social, and Religious.  New York: Bantam Books, 1980.
Howard Bloom, The Muhammad Code: How a Desert Prophet Brought you ISIS, al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, Feral House, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/10/how-hamas-entered-israel/
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bjqiytzza
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-takes-foreign-journalists-to-see-massacre-site-in-kfar-aza/,
https://headlinesmart.com/at-least-40-babies-and-children-massacred-by-hamas/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-hamas-gaza-war-1.6992321
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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.