Page 12 - North Star 2024

Unfortunately, fanatic and extremist groups like Hamas’s military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades (which led the tragic and violent October 7th attacks), have co-opted Islamic messaging and aesthetics to justify acts of barbarism. It should be remembered that the actions taken by such radical groups do not represent Islam and fundamentally contradict the religion’s core principles. In addition, and contrary to what many defenders of genocide have argued, the people of Gaza do not overwhelmingly support Hamas. The group was unpopular when it took power through a violent war in 2007, and according to polls taken as recently as last year, they remain unpopular, having remained in power largely due to the lack of any alternative political parties in the
region.
The Islamic faith of Palestine has long invited blistering attacks seeped in bigotry and racism. The investigative magazine The Intercept has labeled this trend as “anti-Palestinianism”, noting that such rhetoric oen demonizes and attacks Muslims to undermine the Palestinian cause. Anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiment has festered in the wake of this ongoing war; seen viscerally in hateful speech, dehumanization of Muslims, and violent crimes. At Netanya College in Israel, hundreds of attackers attempted to break into Palestinian students’ dormitories while yelling “Death to Arabs.” In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) recorded a 172% increase in anti-Muslim bias this year, corresponding to a surge in similar Islamophobic hate crimes recorded by the FBI since October 2023. Across the world, mosques and Muslim-owned businesses have been vandalized in record numbers, with perpetrators seemingly blaming the current Middle Eastern crisis on Islam. Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Muslim child in Chicago, was stabbed 26 times and murdered by a landlord who screamed “You Muslims must die” at him and his mother. In November 2023, the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University published a report called “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes in the Palestine-Israel Discourse,” which noted that “the portrayal of Muslims as loyal to terrorists and presumptively antisemitic is a well-worn image” used to demonize the religion and its adherents.
Islam has long been used to represent savagery and barbarism in the conversation on Palestine. A 2012 ad campaign by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) headlined the phrase “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.” Jihad is an Islamic term for the spiritual battle against sin, although it has been treated as a synonym for terrorism by those who know nothing about Islam. In such propaganda, the Islamic religion has become a shorthand for evil incarnate. Anti-Palestinian dehumanization frequently includes the deriding of the Islamic faith. Videos posted by the IDF