Steve Ambler is professor emeritus of economics in the École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal.At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, the Allied powers committed to accepting nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy. This was designed to eliminate any possibility that the Nazis and their allies could survive beyond the end of the war, rebuild their military strength, and renew the conflict.Why is this relevant? The Carney government announced that it will recognize a Palestinian state, while seeming to drop the conditions it had outlined in July: the release of all Israeli hostages, the disarming of Hamas, and a guarantee of no participation by Hamas in a future Palestinian government. Instead, it called for an “immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire.” This raises the probability that Hamas will survive as the governing party in Gaza, and will be able to rebuild its military in order to carry out more attacks like the one on October 7, 2023 (as it has openly promised to do)..TUCKER: The death of conversation: How we mistake group identity for moral clarity.The parallels between Hamas and the Nazi movement are striking. This should not be surprising. The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a chapter) was led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. He lived in Berlin between 1941 and 1945, helped recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS, and promised Hitler he would extend the Final Solution (the Nazi plan to eradicate all Jews) to the Middle East. Understanding these parallels may help to comprehend the kind of enemy that Israel has had to fight in its recurring wars.The Nazis aimed to conquer the whole of Europe in order to ethnically cleanse vast areas of the continent for Lebensraum (resettlement by members of the master race), and then eventually to dominate the rest of the world. Hamas seeks to remake the Caliphate that once extended from Spain to Iran, and then eventually to dominate the rest of the world..Hamas also aims to kill all Jews between the river and the sea (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which would encompass Gaza (where no Jews have lived since 2005), the West Bank, and Israel itself), as a prelude to killing all Jews in the rest of the world.The aims of the Nazis were clearly laid out for everyone to see in Mein Kampf. The original Hamas Covenant of 1988 clearly lays out its aims. Its Article 7 includes the following quote: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jews will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, ‘O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree), would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”.MILLS: From underdog to undone: The trouble with John Rustad’s leadership.The Nazis came to power by winning a plurality of votes in the 1933 German election, the last one held in Germany until the end of World War II. Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 Gaza election, and there has not been an election in Gaza since. The SS/Hitler faction of the Nazi movement eliminated its internal rivals (the SA) with widespread assassinations during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Hamas eliminated its Fatah rivals in Gaza in 2007 with widespread assassinations, tossing many Fatah members off the tops of tall buildings..The Nazis indoctrinated children from a very early age by enrolling them in the Hitler Youth. Hamas runs camps where young children are taught to hate Jews and to manipulate arms and explosives, with the goal of turning them into child soldiers and suicide bombers.During the Blitz in 1940, and later with V-1 rockets, the Nazis attacked major British cities in order to maximize civilian casualties and instill terror. Hamas has been firing rockets indiscriminately at Israel since 2006, with the same goals..EDITORIAL: LGB breaking free from the rainbow alphabet soup.Hitler was happy to see German civilians being slaughtered in 1945 because he thought the German people had failed him and deserved to die. The Hamas leadership is happy to see the civilians of Gaza die because they get a propaganda victory in the West every time one of their human shields is killed.One fundamental difference between the Nazis and Hamas is that the former tried to keep their crimes secret, telling the Jews they were being “resettled” rather than transported to death camps. Hamas proudly filmed their atrocities on October 7, 2023, on their GoPro cameras for the world to see..Another major difference has to do with Hamas' enemy compared to the enemies of the Nazi regime. If the Israeli Air Force had been targeting Gaza like Allied bombers carpet-bombed German cities or Russian artillery shelled Berlin in 1945, there would have been hundreds of thousands of casualties among the civilian population. As many as half a million German civilians were killed in the Allied bombing campaign. In the last four months of the war, Russian troops engaged in widespread looting and the wholesale rape of German women. Much of the sympathy for Hamas in the West derives from the idea that they are the underdogs: the Palestinians are weak while Israel is strong. This was already the case for the Axis powers at the time of the Casablanca Conference. After losing the Battle of Midway, the Second Battle of El Alamein, and the Battle of Stalingrad, they had strictly no chance of winning the war..HILTON-O’BRIEN: Is public education dying?.If it is not completely destroyed while the Palestinian Authority assumes control of Gaza, Hamas will be able to eliminate its rivals as it did in 2007, continue its oppression of Gaza’s inhabitants, and resume its campaign to eradicate Israel and the Jews. That the Carney government is unaware of this (or does not care) should be a source of shame to all Canadians.Steve Ambler is professor emeritus of economics in the École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal..Due to a high level of spam content being posted, all comments undergo manual approval by a staff member during regular business hours (Monday - Friday). Your patience is appreciated.
.jpeg?w=480&auto=format%2Ccompress&fit=max)
