Akhtar Raja
The inhabitants of Gaza are being killed with impunity by the hour. Blowing up women and children sheltering in homes, schools, hospitals, and tents into smithereens is the norm. Hospitals are being annihilated, journalists burned alive, and children beheaded. The gruesome details of torture and murder of Palestinian detainees by the Israeli army were revealed in indictments against a handful. The spectacle of executions of Palestinian rescue workers – some of whom had their hands and feet tied – and their burial in a mass grave represents another Israeli method of war. All this characterises the Zionist state’s DNA which has turned Gaza into a killing field, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
A satanic sounding proclamation describes these events as ‘dissecting’ Gaza. The announcement was made by, no less, the person whom the economist Jeffrey Sachs called a “deep, dark …” figure: a sentiment repeated on Truth Social by Donald Trump. An independent and free-thinking Hollywood would have little difficulty rebranding Christopher Lee’s role as the ‘Prince of Darkness’. Netanyahu is a real life contender: feasting on blood and practising in the art of illusion and delusion.
Every human has the capacity to be evil. This is something a soul gravitates towards - or in the case of Netanyahu, fully embraces - when truth, justice and generally ‘good’ (as defined by universal morals) are outweighed. The Quran explains that every soul is tried with evil and with good. But what makes the faculty of deciphering, which resides in a person’s intellect (or ‘aql’) and which distinguishes good from evil, such a hopeless failure? Why does a singular commitment to evil by a leader and his nation prevail?
The bestselling author Jonny Thomson says, ‘History teaches us that most people are only ever a small nudge away from being able to abuse, torture, and murder other human beings. We only need a reason to be evil…’. He refers to Nietzsche’s view that some people always ‘take great pleasure in some insatiable outburst of violence, all in the name of some holy or justifiable revenge’. Gustave Le Bon, the polymath, noted that the masses never thirst after truth. They are amenable to being led by someone who supplies them with illusions. Anyone who destroys these illusions becomes their victim. Probing deeper, Carl Jung agreed that man is a wolf to man. The wolf acts when mental illness becomes the norm rather than the exception in the form of a psychic epidemic. At its worst this is represented by a mass psychosis or collective madness.
The Jungian wolf in Islamic terms is the wild uncontrolled self (or‘nafs’). If untamed it has the capacity to become immeasurably cruel and murderous. That exists in the psyche and genetics of Zionism - individually and in the collective conscience.
Katie Halper the comedian, filmmaker, and political commentator unveiled the real history of Zionism during her recent appearance on Double Down News. She described Zionism as being intentionally antisemitic so that it (and its sponsors) can justify project Israel and their pursuit of power and a foothold in the Middle East.
Christian Zionism predates this. It facilitated, encouraged, and funded the Zionist supremacist mission. Balfour himself was an antisemite and white supremacist. He aided the Zionist cause in 1917 to limit Jewish immigration to Britian to further his ethno-nationalistic vision (rather like British politics today): “Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities. They are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.” The British foreign secretary David Lammy’s hypocrisy and absence of self-identity, would do Balfour proud. He has simply replaced the word ‘black’ with ‘Muslim’. Prime Minister Starmer’s metamorphosis from human rights lawyer to a war crimes and genocide co-conspirator equally demonstrates an unwavering commitment to Balfour’s policy and the long standing British political tradition of hubristic hatred for the other.
The Balfour blueprint, on steroids, is front and centre of Israel’s conduct. The apartheid state’s character was never hidden. The Jewish Colonial Trust was the first Zionist bank which incorporated in London on 20 March 1899. It was used to obtain capital and credit to help attain a charter for Palestine.
Halper says Zionism willingly weaponised the holocaust and the corresponding need to eradicate Palestinians from their land to avoid a repeat of the massacre of Jews. To achieve this Zionists thought Jews, amongst whom there were the religious, scholars and the cosmopolitan, ‘went to their slaughter and thereby became a source of shame.
Zionism internalised antisemitism. These victims were called ‘soap’ by Zionists on the basis of a myth that the bodies of Jews were used by the Nazis to make soap. Zionists even went to the extremes of bombing synagogues and Jews who were peacefully coexisting in Iraq and Morocco to get them to emigrate to Israel. Mizrahi Jews were put into camps. The Zionists rejected Yiddish spoken by Eastern Europeans and Arabic spoken by the Mizrahis.
Modern Hebrew was created. Evil flourished in the apartheid state.
Reassuringly, Halper rightly confirms Jews are not ‘a monolith’ all of whom are loyal to Israel. Historically they have been involved in civil rights movements (for example in the US and South Africa). Today, they live safely in Germany.
They are not part of the same malevolent ideology. Many Jews remain sincerely and actively desirous of justice. But ‘never again’ has not prevented Israel from being the perpetrator of another extermination.
Recently, widely circulating footage of medics in ambulances responding to an emergency call shows them arriving amid intense gunfire from Israeli executioners. A dying medic is heard repeatedly declaring ‘I bear witness there is no god but Allah…Muhammad is the messenger of Allah…Allah is Great.’
As he draws his last few breaths, and his voice softens, there is a pause. He resumes seeking forgiveness for himself and his brothers while praying for a high station with his Lord. Tenderly, he directs his remaining words to his mother:
“Mother, forgive me. This is the path I chose - I wanted to help people. Forgive me, Mother. I swear, I only took this path to help people.” His soul departs and silence follows. Contrast this to the dying cry ‘We were wrongdoers’ described in the Quran. That would be the last utterance of an evil group held to account by the real Sovereign.
Wherein all of this lies the allegiance of kings and rulers of Muslim nations? Why do their armies fail to save lives?
Perhaps the former and the latter and some Grand Muftis would benefit from the poet philosopher Allama Iqbal’s words:
But now the blood of Israel boils up in rage at last,
And some new Moses breaks the spell that wizard Samiri cast!
None with diamond’s orb invest but the Most High alone:
He is the Sovereign, all the rest are idols carved from stone;
Stain with no slavery you freesouled estate,—worse pagan than
The Brahmin, if your chisel mould a king out of a man.
Akhtar Raja is a British lawyer based in London and Principal of Quist Solicitors.
