Hamas and uprooting the malicious tree of terrorism.
Ahmed Sobhy Mansour on 10/14/2023
First: An idea about our effort is to raise awareness about the malicious tree and how to eradicate it peacefully:
1. In a meeting with some American policy makers, in the presence of an influential congressman, I explained to them how to peacefully eliminate terrorism. I said: Terrorism is a malicious tree. You only see its fruits represented by terrorist operations, and your solution is a security solution only. This security solution does not solve the problem, but rather complicates it. In dealing with the tree of terrorism, we must uproot it. Uprooting it does not mean destroying them with weapons and explosives. The roots here are not a material thing, but perverted religious ideas that grew in a corrupt incubating environment. Therefore, eliminating those religious ideas is not by using a physical weapon, because you will be like one who is chasing a wisp of smoke. Rather, using weapons will make the solution impossible. It will worsen the situation with innocent victims falling. And the revenges that follows. Wahhabism is the roots of terrorism, and eliminating the roots of its malicious tree can only be achieved through a system of religious and legislative reform that establishes a secular, civil, legal state in which there is separation between executive, legislative and governmental powers, freedom of the media and the transfer of power, fighting corruption by law, purifying the constitution and laws from any restrictions on opinion and thought, with education reform. And care for those in need.
I said: I am not asking you to intervene to impose reform, because reform is a long road, and it must come from within, and it cannot be imposed from the outside. What is only required is that you help the reformers, while they are under siege and victims of persecution.
I received polite smiles and that was it.
2. The same speech was repeated in different ways in:
2/1: A lecture at the right-wing American Hudson Center:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZsXWxo8QY
2/2: Testimony at a US Senate hearing about confronting the Muslim Brotherhood in America and abroad:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?299005-1/muslim-brotherhood&fbclid=IwAR0OhiBMMvYpMuzhSpmrmb5CXbPo3K4nhVovMBLSZ-g3XCh26e8CINW4ay4
2/3: A special session in the US State Department building with Mrs. Margaret Scobey before her travel as American ambassador to Egypt, at her request.
2/4: A lecture at the Qur’anic Society Conference in Texas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQrZaYGb7_4
2/5: Research in English, including:
2/5/1: Religious freedom between Islam and fanatical Muslims. On a one-year fellowship at the US Commission on Religious Freedom
Religious freedom between Islam and fanatic Muslims
https://ahl-alquran.com/arabic/book_main.php?main_id=75
2/5/2: Rules of engagement in the intellectual war against jihadists, in a one-year grant at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and published on our website:
Rules of engagement in war of ideas against Jihadists
https://ahl-alquran.com/arabic/book_main.php?main_id=76
3. This resulted in defining the contradiction between Islam and Wahhabism, that is, defining the roots of the problem and how to solve it.
But all of this didn’t get us the attention we deserve.
In America, we are still being ignored, and the Quranies in Egypt and elsewhere are still under the yoke of persecution.
Second: About the crisis of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, and its sisters:
1. There are two views on what is happening in Gaza, and what appears in terms of the suffering of its people and the pictures of the victims, including dead and wounded children, women, the elderly, and youth, and the destruction of neighborhoods on the heads of their inhabitants:
1/1: The majority focuses on the superficial image, shouts denunciation, and supports Hamas and its sisters.
1/2: The small minority that considers Hamas to be responsible for what happened and is happening. This is with their sympathy for the people of Gaza.
1/3: I claim that I am the most sympathetic of them all, not only because I belong to the oppressed on earth, but also because my focus is not on (Hamas and its sisters), who are the poisonous fruits of Wahhabism, the malicious tree, and its ancient roots. As long as that root alive and continue to grow, its bloody fruits will continue to produce rivers of blood, body parts of victims, and suffering for innocent, vulnerable people, the salt of the earth.
In fairness, we say that the extremists of Israel and Hamas helped plant and establish this malicious tree together.
2. After the 1967 victory Israel occupied Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, which was administered by Egypt, and the West Bank, which was administered by Jordan. The moderate Israeli left wing was the reason for the Oslo Accords, which Yasser Arafat signed with Shimon Peres on September 13, 1993, under which the Palestine Liberation Organization recognized Israel, resolving issues through negotiation without violence, and establishing a Palestinian self-governing authority (the Palestinian National Authority) for a transitional period not exceeding five years to reach a permanent settlement, with subsequent negotiations on Jerusalem, refugees and settlements. Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in 2005. This was a prelude to the solution by establishing a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel with peaceful relationship and economic cooperation.
To disrupt the two-state solution, Israeli extremists funded Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the (spiritual) leader of Hamas.
3. Hamas won the elections (January 2006) and the elections were clean and fair under international supervision. President Abbas Abu Mazen assigned Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh to form the government for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In September of the same year, Hamas attacked supporters of the Fatah movement. In June 2007, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, secluded it and its residents, and made it the base of its attack on Israel to achieve its goal: (liberating all of Palestine from sea to river). Keep in mind that Israel helped Hamas in the beginning, and then paid the price. Making it very clear that Israeli extremists are a real danger to the people of Israel.
4. Let us remember that Hamas is just a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood is the largest branch of Wahhabism, and it is the root of the malicious tree that the world suffers from especially the Middle East region since the middle of the twentieth century. Wahhabism has become a threat to the Saudi state itself, which exported it to the world. That is why the Saudi Crown Prince began to sever the Saudi state’s connection with Wahhabism and started reforming his state, which we support and hope it will continue. Meanwhile most other Islamic countries still make criticizing Wahhabism a crime of contempt of religion.
5. Hamas chose to impose its Wahhabism on the residents of Gaza, and places them under martial law and in a continuous state of war. Because of that the residents of Gaza suffer from a continuous siege for which they are not to blame, and in every war their homes fall. Money comes from the Gulf to reconstruct Gaza, and most of it goes to the bottomless pockets for warlords, and the rest is in building tunnels and providing and manufacturing weapons.
During the era or Abdel-Nasser the Gaza Strip was a free market, its branches extended to Cairo and other Egyptian cities, and after hopes were renewed that the Gaza Strip would become a popular and safe market competing with Singapore, the population of Gaza became as we see them now, between destruction and blood, cutting off the means of life, and even the possibility of displacement to Sinai. This is a crime committed by Hamas and its sisters against the residents of the Gaza Strip.
6. Reforming Hamas and its sisters does not mean using violence. It is just a branch of a malicious tree. If you cut this branch, the Wahhabi tree will produce alternative branches. The tree must be uprooted peacefully, and this is very easy, and the proof is that we, the People of the Quran, succeed in it even though we are under persecution and struggle with bare hands against the biggest criminals with their unlimited resources. The easiest way to eradicate Wahhabism is to compare its Sunni religion and the history of Arab tyranny to the Holy Quran, and to prove their contradictions to real Islam. They derive their strength from their claim that they represent Islam. By proving the opposite, they will lose the justification for their existence and control. They are like a bomb, if you defuse it, it becomes just a dead stone.
Third: Israel:
1. The moderate movement in Israel has diminished. Its symbols were Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Barak (with some reservations about him). With the rise of Hamas, the left disappeared, and the fanatical right emerged to control Israel. Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon were the most prominent symbols of fanaticism. After them, Netanyahu appeared more fanatical, and then someone appeared who was more fanatical than Netanyahu (Ben Gvir) and others like him.
2. Netanyahu ruled Israel as its prime minister for the longest time. This is despite accusations of corruption that pushed him to try to reduce the judiciary system. This is in a precedent that has never happened in Israel before which prides itself on its democratic system that separates between the government and other civil authorities. Netanyahu's (King Bibi) ambition for tyranny was influenced by the culture of tyranny and clinging to the throne in the region. Even in the West Bank, Abbas still rules without elections and without shame.! (Abbas was born in 1935 and assumed power in 2004).
The crisis with Hamas may be a wake-up call for Israel, as Netanyahu has weakened the army, sparked division among the people and unprecedented opposition demonstrations. But does the understanding of the lesson reach the influential ruling class across the political spectrum?
3. Palestine is like no other land that has been inhabited and ruled by nations since the dawn of history. It was settled by the Canaanites, and they became extinct, and was ruled by the Pharaohs, the Children of Israel (David and Solomon, peace be upon them), the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, and the English. And the Israelis recently.
We ask:
3/1: Who guarantees that Israeli rule will not end as its predecessors did?
3/2: Israel is relatively strong because its opponents are weak. Power is relative. There is no absolute power. Israel is powerful in relation to those who are weaker. Can Israel guarantee that it will remain strong and firmly established until the end of this century? Will its Arab opponents - who are in the cycle of population increase - remain weak, or will the next generation come different and stronger, and its strength will be at the expense of Israel?
3/3: Suppose that Israeli extremism remained ruling in this generation, and committed more and more massacres, ecstatic with the arrogance of power. The result is that children who are victims today will be the men seeking vengeance tomorrow. The Palestinians fight the Israelis by having a lot more children. In an expected population increase that will change the demographics, it will be easy, according to the Wahhabi doctrine of martyrdom, to sacrifice a million in exchange for the eradication of the Israeli people who are shrinking in population, especially with the reverse migration, and the ethnic disparities and differences between the Israeli population of Ethiopians, Sephardim, and Ashkenazim, in addition to the Israeli Arabs, and the other non-Jewish population who married Jewish women. Perhaps the next Israeli generation will be different from today's generation, and it will have nothing to do with what today's generation did, but it will pay the price. We talk about Palestinian and Israeli children today and tomorrow when they become men. What happens when the balance of power shifts to the Palestinian side, with superiority in population? Will the next Palestinian generation forget about revenge after the suffering they lived in, which shaped their mentality? What will be their revenge on the next Israeli generation, which has no fault in what the extremists of Israel did to them in this era? The Jews gained the world's sympathy because of what Hitler did to them in the Holocaust. But would the world sympathize with them tomorrow if a Holocaust happened because of the crimes of the present Israeli generation?
3/4: They are fighting over a land that was occupied before them by nations and ruling families, they all died and turned to dust in this land. In their struggle over this land, they shed blood and spread destruction, misery and suffering among the oppressed inhabitants of this land. In the end, the earth world will be inherited by the Almighty Creator. As for the person who lives on it, they should live in safety and peace. is that impossible? If it is impossible, make it possible for the sake of your children’s future.
Finally: We, the people of the Quran:
1. Are with the right of life, safety, and well-being for every human being, especially children. And we are with the oppressed, regardless of time, place, language, religion, or sect.
2. Are not against the individuals of the Israeli, Palestinian and Arab extremists, but against their ideas. The possibility of repentance is possible and required.
3. Believe that a peaceful solution is the way to stop the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There must be peaceful coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis, and the existence of two cooperative states in one region, with equal rights.
This will never happen until the tree of terrorism is uprooted.