Trump and ISO certification for Hamas

By Hassan Asfour
Not hours after a halt to what the writer calls the “extermination war” against the people of the Gaza Strip, the Muslim Brotherhood movement “Hamas” rushed to carry out public field executions, under the pretext that the victims were “collaborators” who had cooperated with the occupying army.

What Hamas has done is not an ordinary crime but a compound one. It strikes at the culture of the Palestinian people first, whose character is not that of criminals, savages or ISIS followers. Yet the Hamas-style executions made that impression very clearly. They are also illegal: a gang deciding alone who must die, with no form of accountability—especially given that most of its security leadership had been sheltering in the tunnels, coming out to decide who it deemed guilty or innocent. This act could not plausibly be the first thing to follow an end to mass killing; arresting anyone is not complicated, and Hamas could have done that instead.

The truth is that what Hamas did reflected a state of terror inside the movement, a fear of popular backlash chasing it for having executed the occupation’s conspiracy: not only by destroying Gaza and eliminating basic human life there for many years, but by reimposing servile guardianship over its rule, setting survival conditions as it sees fit, and severing the north from the remaining parts of the homeland—thus serving the Judaizing project.

What Hamas undertook appears clearly to be part of a special deal between the Muslim Brotherhood movement, Hamas, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to carry out executions as a reciprocal service—without realizing that it was serving the core of Trump’s plan to portray the Palestinian people as extremist and undeserving of unprecedented global sympathy. The U.S. president did not hesitate to support that movement in its crimes, as he seeks every means to smear the Palestinians after they gained worldwide support and sympathy.

By these field crimes against people, Hamas—especially after Trump revealed the “special deal” with Hamas (service for service—eliminating its opponents in exchange for extended survival)—quickly tarnished the global solidarity movement. Scenes of Hamas executions began occupying the visual narrative alongside images of crimes by the occupying entity, and in some instances have become a complete substitute for them.

The Muslim Brotherhood movement believes that this path will open the door to imposing itself through intimidation and crime, as it did after its black coup in June 2007, which was backed by the occupying state, against members of Fatah on November 11, 2007, who had come out to commemorate the eternal founder Yasser Arafat. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded in fear and horror at what might become a popular movement that would overthrow the imposed rule.

As is the nature of Brotherhood movements, they consider the “American” or “Jewish” promise to them sacred, without learning from their history or that of others. At core they are institutions that trade services for services, far from patriotic instincts. Since their founding—by a British intelligence decision in 1928—their path has not differed in that transactional pattern, as shown by their experiments in neighboring Jordan and in Egypt during Morsi’s rule, and wherever the opportunity presented itself.

Trump is not as naive as the Brotherhood leaders. His encouragement for them to commit ISIS-style crimes is part of completing his Judaizing plan for Palestine, which is why he was quick to grant them a kind of “ISO” certification for what they did.

Here, anyone who stands in support of Hamas’s ISIS-like actions—individuals and factions—should be pursued by national courts on charges of committing war crimes against Palestinians. That is the responsibility of civil institutions, which must not be seized by a trembling fear in the face of the campaign of intimidation. It is also part of the responsibility of the Palestinian official institutions to begin compiling a list of the movement’s security officials who carried out these acts in order to bring them to justice.

Note: The Palestinian embassy’s ignoring the reception of prisoners freed in the Sharm el-Sheikh deal is a national discourtesy. No one holding an official position has the right to act in this manner, whoever they may be. Their release from captivity was not thanks to that movement; it was an insignificant part of the price of the greatest crimes of the modern era… Holding the negligent to account is a right and a necessity, Mr. President.

Special remark: It looks like that very movement wants to flip the positions of the anger movement against Netanyahu inside the entity—from outrage at him to rage with him—so that he will reopen the gates of hellfire on Gaza. The currency of the bodies narrative works against them. Do you understand, neighbors at al-Udeid base?