Keith Knight, the managing editor here at The Libertarian Institute and host of the Don’t Tread on Anyone podcast, was recently interviewed by Ryan Dawson, host of The Anti-Neocon Report, on the topic of Israel’s violence. Dawson shared the following segment on X in which Knight efficiently debunks the Zionist propaganda claim that Hamas launched “Operation Al Aqsa Flood” on October 7, 2023, because it is waging a religious war against Jews.
The document Knight references, “Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, was reported by the indispensable Palestine Chronicle on January 21, 2024, and is downloadable here (also from the Internet Archive here).
Knight summarizes Hamas’s stated reasons for its 10/7 operation as being against Zionist oppression, theft, and murder, and not against Israelis because they are Jewish. He astutely observes the cognitive dissonance manifested when Americans who are incapable of comprehending how Hamas could possibly claim any kind of justification for this operation themselves claim justification for the nuking of Japanese civilians in August 1945.
Of course, neither attacks instance of attacks on civilians were in fact justified. The point here is to highlight the hypocrisy. Many Americans rightly condemn Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians while supporting Israel’s outright genocide in Gaza.
We always hear about the role of Islamic extremism in the conflict while the Jewish and Christian extremism that fuels the violence is overlooked.
On page 13 of the document, issued by the Hamas Media Office, it explicitly states:
Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.
That paragraph was taken from a policy paper issued by Hamas in May 2017 titled “A Document of General Principles & Policies“, which was described by some Western media outlets as a new Hamas charter.
I mentioned that 2017 policy document and referenced that specific paragraph in my own recent discussion with Knight on his show, in which I explained why Israel’s systematic targeting of the civilian population and infrastructure of Gaza does amount to the crime of genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Watch that episode of Don’t Tread on Anyone here, and read my bullet point summary of our discussion here.
