(GATESTONE INSTITUTE) – Hamas, a so-called liberation movement, was voted into power as the governing party by the Palestinian people of Gaza in 2006. The group immediately engaged in armed conflict with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and his Fatah faction, and forcibly removed them from Gaza, including by throwing at least one official off the 15th floor of a building. Hamas also undertook a jihad (holy war) against the neighbouring country of Israel by attempting to kill Israelis or drive them away to take control of the land.

Hamas, designated a terror group by Western nations, is an Islamist fundamentalist group whose 1988 Covenant openly supports a Sharia law-based paradisical Caliphate free of non-believers and a world free of Jews (end of Article 7). Captured non-believers, including Christians, are offered the choice of converting to Islam; being murdered or living among their captors as “dhimmis” – literally, “protected” third-class residents who have to pay protection tax, the jizya, and live under humiliating laws.

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“Following the path of Allah means, in the narrowest sense, propagating Islam through holy war,” said the renowned philosopher Franz Rosenzweig as early as 1921. His observation highlights the crux of the problem: there are two sets of rules. Jihadists fight according to their holy-war rules while Israelis are restricted to Western rules of a “just war,” including, for instance, the Geneva Conventions.