The Hamas Covenant: Exterminate the Jews

Ron Rosenbaum has a column in Slate on the people who are actually intent on genocide in the conflict between Israel and Hamas: Hamas. They said so in their founding document of 1988, and have never renounced it. Genocide against the Jews is their reason for existence. What more does one need to know?

What it represents is Hamas’ own self-definition. Its articulation of its sacred mission...which reads:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory)."

There is no equivocation. There is just "obliteration." Not explicitly genocidal, it could be argued that it's just metaphorical—that the destruction of Israel will somehow not involve any harm to the vast majority of 5 million Jews there

There is more, of course:

OK, let's concede that metaphoric possibility. But then we must contend with the...explicitly genocidal—element of the Hamas Covenant: Article 7. The article that is an explicit call for the extermination of all Jews. An explicit call for genocide.

Here is how it reads in English:

"… [T]he Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

...The language calls for the mission of Hamas to be to seek out and find every Jew wherever they may be hiding and kill him or her. No Day of Judgment until that is done.

It continues to shock me that a group with an overtly genocidal mission written into its covenant for a quarter century now, is somehow treated as a legitimate participant in the world’s diplomatic processes. A potential “partner for peace.” Talk about a flawed moral equivalence.

I guess some people just prefer to ignore the obvious, even when the murders declare their intentions in writing.