The Roots of October 7 Can be Found in the Hamas Charter: 'Genocide Against Israelis'

No one who has read the Hamas Charter should be surprised by the slaughter that took place on October 7 last year. Created in 1988 shortly after the terror group's founding in 1987, the Charter states that, "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it."

It means "genocide of Jews," according to Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and now Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

He calls it "a Charter to perform genocide against Israelis and to annihilate the state of Israel as we know it."

"The document has one very specific purpose," says Hillel Frisch, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy. "And that is to call for the destruction of the State of Israel, to organize all Muslims for that purpose, and to create a military terrorist force to do the job."

An offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the name Hamas is an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement. Its original Charter reads like something written in Nazi Germany. 

Article 22 states, "With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others." 

The document blames Jews for the French and Communist revolutions, World Wars I and II, and states that Jews created the United Nations, "to enable them to rule the world..."

"There is no war going on anywhere without having (Jews') finger in it," the Charter says. 

Article 17 even blames Jews for the creation of the Rotary and Lions Clubs, which Hamas apparently sees as sinister forces.

The document also quotes from a Muslim hadith: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"  

In 2017, Hamas issued a revised Charter, which softened some of the original's violent and antisemitic rhetoric. 

However, Conricus says the October 7th massacre exposed the revised Charter as a fraud. 

"All that was a smokescreen," he said. "And Hamas very cleverly misled Israeli decision-makers until they revealed what their real intentions were. And they did that on October the 7th.  When you read in between the lines, including the second watered-down version, it is still a genocidal document that calls for the extermination of Israel and the founding of an Islamist state."

Article 13 in the original Charter rejects any negotiated settlement and says the only solution for the Palestinian question is Jihad or Holy War.
 
Frisch says that's just as well because any negotiations would likely allow Hamas to remain in power. 
 
"And within two, three years, they'll be exactly at the same point as they were on October 6th, the day before the slaughter," Frisch said.
 
Conricus said he has "hopes" that "in the future, there will be peace to be made with the Palestinians. Many Israelis want to make peace with the Palestinians. But there's no peace to be made with Hamas."
 
Because the original Hamas Charter forbids peace until Israel is destroyed. 

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