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Douglas Murray claims Hamas and ISIS are 'ideological bedfellows'

Douglas Murray claims Hamas and ISIS are 'ideological bedfellows'

Categories: Latest News

Monday August 25 2014

Douglas Murray in a guest column for the Daily Express on Thursday attempts to transmute popular outrage at Israel’s disproportionate assault on Gaza, in which nearly 2,000 Palestinian civilians have been murdered, into a rallying cry in support of Israel’s military campaign by arguing that she is ‘on the front line’ of the struggle against ISIS.

Murray, in a style reminiscent of the speech given by Tony Blair at the Bloomberg office in London earlier this year, groups Hamas together with Hezbollah, Boko Haram and ISIS suggesting all share ‘the exact same ideology – if not yet the same means’. And in the same vein as Blair, Murray links events in the Middle East and Africa with the so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ plot, as though all were seamlessly linked.

Murray seems oblivious to important qualifiers: Hamas is the democratically elected government in Gaza and Hezbollah possesses both a military and political wing with the latter having a presence in the Lebanese parliament. This lazy classification is symptomatic of the British Government’s inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood on similarly flawed premises; believing the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt to be a terrorist organisation’ because the military ruler who ousted a democratically elected president in a coup d’etat decreed it so.

Conveniently glossing over these important distinctions, Murray’s article appears to be a call to defend Israel’s brutality against the Palestinians by inferring that Jews, Christians and other religious minorities, the ‘Yazidis, Mandeans’ and ‘other minority faiths in Islamist-dominated countries’ are all at threat if Israel is denied the means, including British arms, to ‘stop the bombarding of its people’.

Murray woefully misrepresents the many factors that have contributed to the latest assault on Gaza focusing solely on Hamas rocket fire into Gaza and omitting other salient factors such as the seven year blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip starving its people of basic necessities such as clean water and sewage drainage; the murder of Palestinian youths by Israeli soldiers before the abduction and murder of the three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, and the murder of 6 further Palestinians children in the ensuing reprisal attacks; no mention of the ongoing illegal settlement building in the West Bank – which pushes the prospect of a two-state solution further into oblivion – nor any mention of the surge in ‘price tag’ attacks which the US government in its 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism defined as ‘acts of terror’.

Murray writes: ‘The extremists of Hamas are the ideological bedfellows of the extremists of IS who are rampaging through Syria and Iraq crucifying and beheading as they go.

‘There are those who think that Israel is somehow the cause of the world’s problems, or that in defending themselves from Islamic extremists Israel is somehow causing Islamic extremism. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

‘They believe that if Israel just gave up fighting and disappeared that the rest of us would be able to live in peace. 

‘Israel is not the cause of the world’s problems. It is simply on the front line of them. 

‘But increasingly so are we all. And if we abandon Israel today then one day – too late – we will realise that in fact what we abandoned was ourselves.’

Murray’s plea is not dissimilar to the argument advanced by former Spanish PM, Jose Maria Aznar, when he wrote, ‘Support Israel: if it goes down, we all go down’.

It is also the line of argument promoted by the Israeli embassy in Ireland with its images of European landmarks emblazoned with the words ‘Israel now, Dublin next’ or ‘Israel now, Paris next’.

Murray is disingenuous in using ISIS’ sectarian bigotry and the horrors inflicted on Muslims and other religious minorities in Iraq and Syria as a means of disparaging the concerns harboured by Britons about the possible war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the right of Palestinians to live in dignity and security. Raising the spectre of ISIS as the ideological current binding together Boko Haram, free schools in Birmingham and protests outside British supermarkets against products sourced from Israel’s illegal settlements, Murray does his best to preach from The Israel Project’s ‘Global Language Dictionary’ and its advice on how to successfully drip feed pro-Israeli propaganda in the media.

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