The horrific acts Hamas terrorists carried out against women, men, and children on October 7, constitute degenerate behaviour of the vilest kind. These atrocities are on record,  documented by the terrorists themselves – using dashcams and GoPro cameras then uploaded to social media – and where, strangely, these individuals exhibit a sense of pleasure, even pride, in the torturing, mutilation and murdering of their victims. Even for war these acts and the aberrant manner they were conducted were of an unprecedented nature. Rape is, for example, unfortunately all too common during military operations where undisciplined soldiers may carry out this crime opportunistically or it is used as a specific tactic to subjugate a population. But what the terrorists did on entering Israel’s Southern border and attacking innocent people went much further than rape; all the while, too, displaying happiness in performing their heinous actions. It’s an inversion of morality and the worst kind of deviant behaviour. 

But how did the sadism so evident on that fateful day come about? Indeed, how might it have been cultivated by Hamas’s leadership? 

A social foundation structured for the spread of cruelty 

Sadism, or to give it its formal psychological name, Sadistic Personality Disorder (SPD), is a condition where individuals gain pleasure – sexual or otherwise – from the humiliation or suffering of others, achieving dominance and control over others, or inflicting pain. Factors promoting SPD include: feeling a sense of injustice about life; the experience of repeated abuse, trauma or personal failure; or growing up in poverty, and seeing no way out. 

These are key risk factors existing in abundance in the Palestinian territories. But it begs the question: instead of spending money on building weapons caches and tunnels – or, as the Palestinian Authority do, funding biased children’s educational programs and paying pensions to terrorists (in what’s termed ‘pay-for-slay’) – why not rise above the perpetuation of hate and violence and spend on building Palestinian society?

To answer this, consider that, counter-intuitive as it sounds, terrorist organisations operating in the Palestinian territories benefit from the breakdown of their own societal fabric – indeed, perhaps even intentionally setting the conditions for its destruction by, at the very least, inaction. 

Take how the law works. It is an amalgam of different legal systems stemming from: the Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate, Egyptian law (in Gaza), Jordanian law (in the West Bank), and Israeli military legislation enacted by the PA; while certain child protection matters relating to Family Law or Personal Status Law may come under the jurisdiction of Sharia or Christian religious courts. 

Furthermore, with few if any courts specialising in violence against children, and judges often inadequately trained, inexperienced or unaware of child rights issues, the complexity and disunity of it all not only falls short of international standards but also fails to act in the best interest of the child. It is notable in that context that the only statistics produced by the Ministry of Social Affairs addressing violence to children omits that committed by adults and focuses on violent acts by child perpetrators.

Even UNICEF, hardly supportive of the difficulties Israel has to wrestle with in the Palestinian territories, recognises the malaise in the social support infrastructure, stating that there are ‘weak and nascent national child protection prevention and response service delivery systems’ such that there is ‘a variable social welfare reach to implement laws, policies and services across the State of Palestine’. This extends to adults too where a ‘Lack of confidence in the formal social welfare sector and reliance on informal dispute resolution mechanisms or conciliations forum has hindered the availability of high-quality services at a national scale.’

And at the same time as many might have lost faith in the formal social welfare system and look instead to communal leadership for support, terrorist functionaries and leaders are busy accruing the essentials, even luxuries, of life – and continue to do so as incentive for furthering their fanatical cause. The result being – if it doesn’t draw the young feeling dispossessed in to that life – a fostering of even greater uncertainty, despair, and a grievance culture in the rest of the population.

As far as essentials are concerned, obtaining them may be through the system of favours or patronage operated through Palestinian society by elite families or clans. Many in Hamas’s leadership enjoy not just the essentials of life but luxuries, having found haven in oil-rich Qatar. If nothing else, it’s all bound to create envy and a desire amongst some in the population to get something for themselves beyond subsistence; in this way, loyalties are bought. But it’s clearly a struggle, and not everybody gains – instead having to rely on international aid agencies. 

It can be argued, then, that the region’s terrorist leaders want this struggle to be in place; they want a level of chaos and inaction to reign. Because, while SPD may account for some terrorists’ appalling cruelty, if those with a political agenda want that depraved behaviour to take root and spread across the population – and infect the children (causing greater violence, in time, to be directed against Israel) – they need to get the disorder’s risk factors to predominate. 

Sadistic behaviour: factors feeding it and its repercussions

Far more people will carry out cruel acts than one would think, to the extent that the psychological stage can be said to be set to support the development of deviant behaviour. Many early infamous psychology experiments on conformity first revealed this (for example, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s electroshock studies). To behave inhumanely, what’s principally required (once the necessary conditions are in place) is acquiescence to an authority figure – a role Hamas fills. And, disturbing as it is, people can then be coerced into causing pain to others. It is apposite that not long after the war began 75 percent of respondents in a Gaza poll stated they supported Hamas (with 59 percent strongly supportive). Despite their personal hardships at that stage, many Gazans still saw Hamas as the dominant authority and were accepting of the savagery they had inflicted on Israelis in the October 7 attack.

A lack of action to improve social conditions for the average Palestinian is bad enough. But against that background of deprivation, feeding SPD, may be heightened experiences of repeated abuse and trauma in early life, which in turn, leads to the abused more likely becoming an abuser and giving vent to their darker inclinations as they get older.

It is at the level of family ties that problems can first emerge. These ties are meant to be the strongest of bonds, particularly in early life. But when those bonds are broken as a result of psychological or physical abuse – including harsh discipline, neglect, child labour, enforced child marriage, and sexual abuse (including incest) – trust is lost in the very people a child believes will protect them. Even accounting for widespread cultural norms, it’s still a brutalising experience. Childhood abuse, particularly sexual, as psychologist Mike Abrams and colleagues showed, increases the chance sadomasochistic behaviour will develop in later life. For females it results in a tendency to turn inwards and display masochistic, self-harming, behaviour. Females becoming suicide bombers can also be traced to this abuse. But for males there is a greater chance of developing sadistic preferences where they are more likely to gain pleasure from the pain and suffering of others.

Even witnessing domestic violence is a form of abuse, one having psychological and physical consequences. The International Men and Gender Equality Survey: Middle East and North Africa (IMAGES-MENA) found that around a quarter of Palestinian respondents reported seeing their mother being beaten by their father or a male relative during their childhood. It is aggression, the report showed, carried through to adulthood. Nearly one in five men said they had perpetrated an act of physical violence against a female partner. 

As for abuse inflicted by parents on their children, health scientist Nouh Harsha and his colleagues found that over a third of West Bank children reported being physically abused by their mothers; despite any preconception that it’s an issue caused only by fathers. Their research, they pointed out, builds on work conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and UNICEF showing that the rate of abuse against children in the Palestinian territories is higher than is found for other geographic regions, including Arab countries. Though that research documented abuse from non-familial as well as familial sources, the excessive finding that over 92 percent of Palestinian children experienced some form of physical or psychological abuse provides pause for thought.

But in recognising that the Hamas terrorists of October 7 were men, it should be noted that childhood physical abuse, especially sexual, has specific repercussions for boys. They are ‘prone to harm other children,’ observes Mohammed Mansour, a psychologist who volunteers in Gaza with Physicians for Human Rights, ‘abusing other children is the ultimate way to restore control to himself.’ And neither do they think of abusing other boys as a homosexual act (though for some it may be). ‘Because,’ adds Mansour, ‘it’s easier socially. If a boy assaults a girl, and she tells someone, he will be killed. They will settle accounts with him within the neighbourhood.’

That’s not to say there doesn’t remain a strong urge to commit violence against girls. But in what is, at least superficially, a religiously conservative society, that urge is suppressed. Or at least it appears to be. For at the same time there is, paradoxically (as the incidents of adult male physical abuse documented by IMAGES-MENA attest to), a degree of violence against women. But what’s especially troubling is that much of it appears normalised. Around 40 percent of Palestinian women, IMAGES-MENA reported, experienced one or more forms of street-based sexual harassment including ogling, catcalls/sexual comments, or even being stalked or followed in a public place. There is a persistent idea, too, that a man who rapes a woman and marries her should not be prosecuted.

It would seem there are embedded cultural attitudes amongst some Palestinian men that they have an entitlement to sexually control women. Couple that with antecedent factors for SPD operating along with any latent tendencies towards deviancy generally, and it remains an open question whether suppression, in addition, resulted in a peculiar focus on mutilating the breasts and genitalia of women in the attack by a number of terrorists; and who again, were joyful about their actions. Certainly, the possibility is there. 

But for the most part as boys get older, they may find an outlet for their emergent brutality in violent, often sexist, shoot-‘em-up video games – including those produced for the Palestinian market like Fursan Al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque where points are scored for shooting and beheading IDF soldiers. 

Moreover, children are abused through indoctrination channelled through the school curriculum, from television controlled by the PA (such as Al-Aqsa TV), and even from summer camps. These elements – where children’s susceptible young minds are exposed to the teaching of hate and violence – are all structured, quite openly, as a system dedicated to celebrating martyrdom, and brainwashing the children with the idea that their lands have been stolen by the Jews of Israel and that they must get them back with blood, ultimately, creating automata who hate and want to kill Jews. Former Israeli premier Golda Meir saw the problem clearly when she wrote, ‘Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.’ Unfortunately, the Palestinians still have hate in the ascendency. And love is subservient to death. The late Maryam Mohammad Yousif Farhat (Umm Nidal), the Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, is known for stating with pride, ‘I already gave three sons, I have another seven [children] to give.’ 

With normal positive emotions stifled, SPD has a greater chance of gaining prevalence. It’s a social condition that helps explain the glee exhibited by the October 7 terrorists when carrying out their barbarism, and the callous celebratory behaviour of Gaza and West Bank residents to the news. ‘Today is a glorious day of historic proportion,’ said Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti as sweets were distributed around him. Abnormal behaviour, unquestionably. And not only does it smack of classical conditioning of the worst kind with hate being reinforced by the reward of a treat, it also reflects premeditated social engineering to weaponise abuse and instil the idea that any evil is socially acceptable if directed against Israel and Jews.

The source of antisemitic sadism

The social mechanism fostering sadism in the Palestinian territories can, clearly, be described. But for this mechanism – and its constituent factors – to operate it must be driven by deeper, powerful influences – not least history and ideology – to ultimately lead to the depths of antisemitic depravities witnessed from the October 7 terrorists.  

Since the rise of Islam in the 7th Century till the early 20th Century Jews had frequently suffered violent abuse under Muslim rule. It is recorded by Ibn Ishaq (d. 768) that 

Muhammad, for example, ordered the execution by beheading of around 700 men of the Jewish Benai Qurayza tribe in Medina for allegedly plotting against him. Hamas – following the actions of other Islamist groups – revived this medieval practice of beheading, amongst other savage methods of slaughtering their victims. And they could cite the Quran as their justification: ‘Strike [the disbelievers] upon their necks and strike every fingertip of theirs’ (8:12); ‘… strike their necks till you have bloodied them’ (47:4).

Further abuses were to come with sporadic pogroms, the earliest and most brutal of which (we know of) occurred in the years 1033 when more than 6,000 Jews were massacred in Fez, and in 1066 when approximately 4000 Jews were massacred in Granada. 

Barbarism against Jews in Arab lands continued through the centuries. And as Historian Georges Bensoussan highlights, from 1830 to 1948, there were repeated massacres of Jews in Palestine with the aim of eradicating them from the country simply because they were Jews. Indeed, most of these massacres occurred well before a Jewish State was ever thought of. Any attempt to justify the terrorists’ inhumanity on October 7 as being a result of Israeli policy in the Palestinian territories cannot therefore be supported. In fact, for Jews in Arab lands, the reality was that violent hatred directed against them, though waxing and waning depending on a particular Muslim sultan’s attitude, had been a historical constant.

For the most part, Jews under Muslim rule lived (as did other minorities residing in the Arab peninsula) as dhimmis, a subjugated group; essentially second-class citizens living in a religious State. Officially, a Jew was considered a ‘protected person’ (the Arabic meaning of dhimmi). In reality, they were singled out for control from a range of discriminatory rules. But as long as they remained loyal to the State, paid the jizya tax, and didn’t forget what these Islamic societies termed ‘their sense of humility’, Jews lived as despised yet tolerated subjects. Some Jews might become professionals or do well in business but they were still an inferior, and suffered an underlying contempt from their Muslim masters with whom they did not enjoy the same rights. That status quo often took on a peculiar character, a type of sadistic casual antisemitism, as a Western traveller to Yemen in 1910 found: 

‘The Jew is the beast on whom one beats at any time, for no reason, to calm one’s nerves, to appease one’s anger.’  

Between Jews and Arab-Muslims, coexistence was fragile. Yet codified violence, adds Bensoussan, kept everyone in their place, at the risk of being accompanied by the spilling of blood.

It is no surprise then that Muslims in villages and towns always seemed to be a hairs-breadth away of spilling the blood of their Jewish neighbours. And it didn’t take much to fuel them with a righteous, vengeful anger. There was the case in Morocco, for instance, of Jewish boys playing ball. One boy kicked the ball and it hit a Muslim girl on her earing, severing her earlobe. For three days the boy’s home was besieged by the whole street. The boy’s parents tried reasoning with them, and offering to pay compensation. But the girl’s parents and the mob didn’t want that; they wanted the boy so they could tear his ear off.  

In the Iranian city of Meshad so concerned were the Jews they could be attacked at any time they built their homes interconnected as escape routes. They weren’t wrong to worry, and for another reason too. In 1896, some Muslim men – feeling entitled to do as they wished with those they saw as beneath them – abducted young Jewish women and girls and sold them as slaves in the public square of Ghardaïa. These are actions emblematic of an inverted morality in a community that considered ‘brutality as bravery’. 

That pervasive level of Arab-Muslim antisemitism, as cruel as it was, would likely have continued with little change had it not been for the rise of Islamism and its Jihadist ideology. No longer a matter of codified violence, violence against Jews would now have an excuse to be unleashed to its fullest.

Islamism first appeared in the late 1920s with the development of the Muslim Brotherhood. In time, explains Markos Zografos in an influential paper written for The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, the Brotherhood would have ‘far-reaching global influence, including but not limited to the Iranian regime after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Hezbollah, Sudan under Omar al-Bashir, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State (ISIS), as well as several NGOs in present-day North America and Europe.’

The organisation’s vicious antisemitic core, Zografos continues, was based on ‘A recurring perception among Muslim Brotherhood members… that Jews conspired behind the West’s ideological and colonialist expansion in order to weaken Islam. Likewise, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 significantly exacerbated the genocidal antisemitic rhetoric and practices of the Muslim Brotherhood.’

The Brotherhood’s goal is to establish a global Islamic Caliphate and the elimination of the secular, pluralistic, and democratic values of the West. It focuses on the United States, Israel, and the Jewish people generally, as epitomising those values, which it perceives as evil, Satanic forces of corruption, decadence, and contamination. In this twisted perception, any destruction (or triumph over – including by murder, taking hostages, and so on) of these ‘forces’ is an opportunity to rejoice. 

The initial years of the Muslim Brotherhood also saw the Nazis promoting it in order to gain an advantage over Britain. At the time, Britain held a strong influence in Egypt, where it effectively established a ‘Veiled Protectorate’– largely to ensure its financial and geopolitical interests in relation to the Suez Canal. The Nazi’s toxic antisemitic worldview found a receptive ear among those early Islamists, already sensitised to the idea of the ‘inferior Jew’. On October 2, 1937, Adolf Eichmann, after meeting with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, reported that in Palestine, ‘they adorn their houses with Swastikas and portraits of Hitler’. And by October 1938, the Brotherhood was distributing Arabic translations of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Tsarist (forgery) The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; both virulently antisemitic works. 

The creation of the Muslim Brotherhood and its preliminary evolution took place well before the founding of the State of Israel. As such, Islamist Jew-hate is by no means a reaction to Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank but something much darker that has threaded itself into the mindset and rhetoric of Muslim political and religious leaders: 

If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not… They would have been our enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…. Our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end… until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth… As for you Jews, the Curse of Allah upon you… you pigs of the Earth!

Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Yaqoob, Al-Rahma TV, 17 January 2009 

That darker factor is, in a phrase, an aggressive jihadist ideology that demands active efforts to establish a global Caliphate – rather than dealing only with encroachments (or perceived encroachments) by the West into Muslim lands. And a major developer of this expansionist religio-nationalist thinking was the Muslim Brotherhood figure, Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). Qutb’s embrace of a theology of violence to achieve his Islamic dream was directed against Jews, who he saw as a ‘cosmic Satanic evil’, and also against Muslims who his outlook viewed as no longer having a ‘pure’ Islamic faith. And from that view, Islam’s very survival, he felt, was dependent on waging a holy war in which killing was morally justified. It was thinking that led to Qutb’s involvement with a plot to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. It resulted in years of imprisonment for Qutb and his eventual execution in 1966.  

While incarcerated Qutb wrote several publications describing his jihadist ideology, and that today Muslim Brotherhood offshoots, such as Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, draw their brutalist inspiration from. Thus grows a belief that it is immaterial who has to be harmed or sacrificed, their own people included, in attempting to get ever-nearer to a universal Islamic Caliphate. 

Qutb has specific things to say about Jews. And in his writings, notably in Our Battle Against the Jews, he lays out what a ‘pure’ Moslem should believe regarding them. In his view, the Jews’ aim is to dominate the world and so they had waged an endless war against the ummah: the worldwide Muslim community of Allah’s true believers. Jews had done this, he asserted, by their deceitfulness and conspiratorial drive to create intrigues since the beginning of Islam. To gain victory over this cosmic evil, Qutb argued that an elite force of Islamic revolutionaries was needed. Within a few short decades this would occur with Hamas and all the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired groups coming into existence, and where viciousness was central to their strategy.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, stated that in fighting the Jewish-backed West, ‘the rules against the slaughter of innocents must be relaxed’. The group’s leader, Osama bin Laden, added with the same callous tone, ‘Yes, we kill their innocents, and this is legal religiously and logically… what we are practicing is good terror. We will not stop killing them.’

Hamas’s 1988 founding Charter similarly follows Qutb’s genocidal thinking. In the second introductory paragraph it declares ‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.’ The introduction further declares ‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.’ It will only end when ‘the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.’

These objectives are ‘the individual duty of every Muslim’ to participate in, Article 12 of the Charter continues, including children who should be raised ‘in preparation for the role of fighting awaiting them’ (Article 18) ‘…with the warmongering Jews’ (Article 32). And, the Charter warns, when it comes to negotiations, any ‘peaceful solutions and international conferences’ are forbidden (Article 13), and that ‘Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason,’ and anyone doing so ‘shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell’ (Article 32).

Hamas’s Charter was a principal outcome of Islamist ideology, and subsequently expressed as violence emanating from the Palestinian territories, against both internal dissent and Israel. Moreover, Hamas’s Jihadism meant Jew-hate was now a prerequisite of Muslim identity – where if you didn’t have a lethal hatred of Jews, you were not a true believer in the one God. Nevertheless, making that murderous mindset a pervasive reality in the Middle East required a push. And this was provided by the Soviet Union in a bid to stop the United States and its allies like Israel maintaining their influence in the region.

Former Lt General Ion Pacepa of the Romanian Foreign Intelligence Service, the DIE, (who defected to the West) estimated that from the mid-1970s to at least the late 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB (the Soviet State Security Service) sent hundreds of ‘influence agents’ and hundreds of thousands of Arabic copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the region to fortify an anti-Israel narrative. Also sent was a mass of fake documentary material that played right into the Islamist’s belief system by ‘proving’ that the Zionist’s aim was the transformation of the Islamic world into Jewish territory. 

The KGB followed that disinformation campaign with another codenamed Operation SIG (an acronym for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or Zionist governments), the purpose of which was:

      ‘…to instil a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel…’. 

The development of a venomous antisemitic Islamism during the last century, coming on top of the underlying historical Jew-hate already operating in Muslim countries, had a powerful cumulative effect. And though the KGB may no longer exist, the ferocious, sadistic antisemitism on display on October 7 testifies to a terrorist bloodbath having been achieved. 

A terrible outcome

The brutal physical torture Hamas terrorists unleashed on their victims was filmed for a reason: it was meant to be as horrific as possible to create disgust, fear, and a loss of spirit in the observer. It was a performative tactic straight out of the playbook of Islamic State (IS) who had employed it against captives in Iraq and Syria. Though Hamas, in their belief they could weaken Israel, made their actions against Jewish adults, and even children and babies, more gruesome than IS had ever enacted. Amongst other cruelties, the terrorists had instructions to kill, behead, and rape their targets; permission was even given to rape the corpse of a girl. The victims were all Satan in the terrorist’s eyes, and in destroying that ‘cosmic evil’ – or debasing it – they took an abnormal pride in the butchery they carried out.

In a now notorious phone call, intercepted by the Israel Defence Forces from that day, a terrorist called his parents from kibbutz Mefalsim near the Gaza border, using the phone of a woman he’d murdered, and says with clear excitement in his voice: 

‘Dad… I killed [them] with my own hands. Your son killed Jews.’

The father replies ‘May God protect you.’ The terrorist repeats himself over and over again, then addresses his mother.  ‘I swear… I killed 10 with my own hands.’

The terrorist’s mother can only finally muster, ‘May God bring you home safely.’ While the father adds, ‘I wish I was with you.’

The terrorist seems frustrated that his mother isn’t joining in his delight, as his father is.

‘Mum, your son is a hero,’ he insists. ‘Kill, kill, kill!… Open WhatsApp on your phone and see how I killed them.’

The terrorist’s warped behaviour and subsequent call to his parents can be said to sum up the level of atrocity committed that day. Cruelty displaces empathy, and without any feeling of wrongness or remorse exhibited by the perpetrator. Indeed, they find pleasure and fulfilment in their degrading, grisly actions, which are chillingly normalised in their consciousness – and can’t wait to tell their families (some of whom have been in the streets spitting on victims taken hostage, whether alive or dead, as they are brought into Gaza on open trucks and motorbikes).  

These terrorists are sadists by definition. And the inherent design behind this – with all the psychological, historical, societal, religious, and ideological factors that feed into it – means that the Palestinian leadership have a segment of their youth who are more likely to become behaviourally deviant in this worst of possible ways. Their ‘pathological strength’ – with all its twisted violence and sick fundamentalism – able to be harnessed for the cause of so-called ‘resistance’. On October 7, 2023, that design bore a malevolent fruit, one that worked against Israel beyond expectation.

 

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state-of-israel-1830-1948/
27 Ibid
28 Menocal, M. R. (2002). The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians
created a culture of tolerance in medieval Spain. Little Brown, New York.
29 Amini, E. (2020). Concealed: Memoire of a Jewish-Iranian daughter caught between the
chador and America. Greenpoint Press, New York.
30 Fenton, P. B., Littman, D. G. (2010). L’Exil au Maghreb. Jews Under Islam, Sources and
Documents, 997-1912. Paris, PUPS (p. 577).
31 Baghdad Sami, champion of the world. Point of No Return. Jewish Refugees from Arab and
Muslim Countries. (2015). https://www.jewishrefugees.org.uk/2015/06/baghdad-sami-
champion-of-world.html See also: Julius, L. (2018). Uprooted: How 3000 years of Jewish
civilisation in the Arab world vanished overnight. Valentine Mitchell (p. 51).
32 Zografos, M. (2021). Genocidal Antisemitism: A Core Ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Occasional series paper 4/2021. ISGAP.
33 Morse, C. (2003). The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-
Husseini. Iuniverse Inc (p. 46).
34 Ya’qoub, M. H. (2009). The Jews Are the Enemies of Muslims Regardless of the Occupation
of Palestine (Source: Al-Rahma TV, Egypt). MEMRI. https://www.memri.org/tv/egyptian-
cleric-muhammad-hussein-ya%E2%80%99qoub-jews-are-enemies-muslims-regardless-
occupation-palestine
35 Wright, L. (2006). The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/1. New York, NY:
Alfred A. Knopf (p. 218).
36 Patterson, D. (2011). A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad. New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press. See also: Patterson, D. (2018). The Muslim
Brotherhood and the Evolution of Jihadist Antisemitism. ISGAP Flashpoint no. 50, January

17, 2018. https://isgap.org/flashpoint/the-muslim-brotherhood-and-the-evolution-of-
jihadist-antisemitism.
37 Hamas Covenant (1988). The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement. Yale Law
School: Lillian Goldman law obrary. The Avalon project.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
38 U.S. Department of State (2022). West Bank and Gaza Strip 2022 Human Rights Report.
https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/415610_WEST-BANK-AND-GAZA-
2022-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
39 Ismail, E, (2022). The Antisemitic Origins of Islamist Violence: A Study of the Muslim
Brotherhood and the Islamic State. Upsala University, (p. 205)..
40 Pacepa, I. M. (2006, August 24). What does Moscow have to do with the recent war in
Lebanon? Russian Footprints. https://www.nationalreview.com/2006/08/russian-footprints-
ion-mihai-pacepa/
41 Pacepa, I. M., Rychlak, R. J. (2013). Disinformation. WND Books.
42 Del Ponte, C., AbuZayd, K. K., Pinheiro, P., Muntarbhorn, V. (2015). Rule of Terror. The
Cairo Review of Global Affairs, No.19. https://www.thecairoreview.com/essays/rule-of-
terror/
43 TOE (2023, 24 October). Kill, behead, rape: Interrogated Hamas members detail atrocities
against civilians. Times of Israel. https://www.timesofisrael.com/kill-behead-rape-
interrogated-hamas-members-detail-atrocities-against-civilians/
44 Aroor, S. (2023, Oct., 26). Chilling audio of Hamas terrorist. India Today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhl9JFiw6sU
45 Kaufman, A. C. (2023, November, 4). ‘I Killed 10 Jews With My Own Hands’: IDF Screens
Raw Hamas Footage For Journalists. Huffpost. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/idf-
hamas-footage_n_6545662ee4b0e3ecaf897336
46 Ibid