Benjamin Netanyahu often spread the slogan to solidify Western support for Israel’s savagery in Gaza. Now the lie has been exposed once and for all, writes Joe Lauria.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing the General Assembly’s 79th session on Sept. 27, 2024. (U.N. Photo/Evan Schneider)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Nine years before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was already at it, comparing Hamas with ISIS. He complained to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 29, 2014 that some countries “evidently they did not understand that ISIS and Hamas were branches of the same poisonous tree.”
He told the Assembly:
“They shared a fanatical creed, which they sought to impose well beyond their own territories. When it came to their ultimate goals, Hamas was ISIS and ISIS was Hamas, and they were all militant Islamists, be they Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, various Al-Qaida branches or other terrorist groups. They shared a goal for a land with no tolerance, where women were chattel and minorities were subjugated, and sometimes presented the same stark choice: convert or die. Anyone could be considered an infidel, including fellow Muslims.”
Like the Nazis Too
He then took the opportunity to make the most important comparison of all, one that Israel uses to justify the genocide they are carrying out today in Gaza.
“The Nazis had believed in a master race, while the militant Islamists believed in a master faith,” he said. In other words, to prevent another genocide against the Jews, Israel must commit a genocide of its own.
The 2009 film Defamation by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir exposes the conditioning of Israelis by the state. The last scene shows a teenager who was on a school trip to Auschwitz. She went as a typical youngster excited about taking her first airplane ride.
By the end of the trip she says she’d like to kill all the Nazis who did that to her people. Told that they are now dead, she chillingly says, “They have heirs.” For the likes of Netanyahu, those heirs are the Palestinians, totally innocent of the crimes of the Holocaust.
The 15-year old film shows how an irrational exaggeration of anti-Semitism and unfounded fear of a new genocide against Jews is deliberately fostered by Israel. Netanyahu and his extremist government, in a classic case of projection as he himself oversees an obvious genocide, says this threat of genocide against Jews comes from Hamas, which he says is the same as ISIS.
After the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him in May 2024, Netanyahu said Israel was “waging a just war against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organisation that perpetrated the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” To deflect attention from your own crimes blame others of them. He accused the ICC prosecutor of being “like judges in Nazi Germany who denied Jews basic rights and enabled the Holocaust,” the BBC reported.
Recurrent Theme
The “Hamas is ISIS” theme is one Netanyahu has banged on repeatedly.
“Just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas,” Netanyahu said just after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
“Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas.”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he had told world leaders that “our war against Hamas is also their war against Hamas”.https://t.co/B7H5ooXry9
? Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube pic.twitter.com/PQaHCCodJ5
— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 25, 2023
Western leaders took up the false analogy.
A week after Oct. 7, then U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said what Hamas did was “worse than ISIS.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hamas’ killings “brings to mind the worst of ISIS.”
French President Emmanuel Macron advanced the analogy, saying Israel was not alone and “France is ready for the coalition, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria against ISIS, to also fight against Hamas.”
The Obvious Differences
Anyone with a shred of knowledge of Islamist groups, which Israeli intelligence certainly possesses, knows the comparison between Hamas and ISIS, let alone Hamas and the Nazis, is false. For one thing, ISIS (and the Nazis) were occupying forces, while Hamas is the opposite. It fights an occupation (in that sense making Israel more like ISIS and the Nazis than Hamas.)
“For all of Israel’s efforts to paint it as the Palestinian branch of the Islamic State, and as reactionary and violent as it is, Hamas is an Islamic nationalist organization, not a nihilist cult, and a part of Palestinian political society; it feeds on the despair produced by the occupation, and cannot simply be liquidated any more than the fascist zealots in Netanyahu’s cabinet,” wrote Jewish American author and critic Adam Shatz, in the London Review of Books, as quoted by The Washington Post on Oct. 25, 2023 in a story headlined, “Israel says Hamas ‘is ISIS.’ But it’s not.”
Politico ran a piece on Nov. 21, 2023 titled, “Hamas Is Not ISIS — and the Comparison Itself Is Counterproductive.” The Associated Press said in article on Nov. 30, 2023: “Israel likens Hamas to the Islamic State group. But the comparison misses the mark in key ways.”
Even Wikipedia says: “International military experts and mainstream international media pointed out major differences, particularly relating to nationalism, Shia Islam, Christianity, democracy, and destruction of cultural heritage.”
But for the most part, the mainstream media reported Netanyahu’s propaganda line without challenge, leading many in Western nations to believe that Hamas was exactly the same as ISIS.
25th anniversary of Hamas celebrated in Gaza on Dec. 8, 2012. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Israel & ISIS
There has long been suspicion of ties between Israel and ISIS. It has often been pointed out that ISIS has never attacked Israel or Israeli interests. ISIS fighters in Syria were reportedly treated in hospitals inside Israel and then returned to the battlefield.
It emerged on Thursday that Netanyahu’s government is working with about 100 militants inside Gaza affiliated with ISIS to fight Hamas. Avigdor Lieberman, the former extremist Israeli foreign minister, revealed this in a radio interview and Netanyahu did not deny it. Haaretz reported:
“Israel is providing weapons to a Jihadist group in the Gaza Strip affiliated with ISIS, Opposition lawmaker and former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday. Responding to the allegations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that ‘Israel is working to defeat Hamas in various ways, on the recommendation of all heads of the security establishment.’
Lieberman said that, similar to how Netanyahu propped up Hamas as a counterweight to the PA [Palestinian Authority], he is now helping establish a new armed force as a counterweight to Hamas. …
Later on Thursday, Netanyahu said Israel mobilized Gazan clans opposing Hamas, and asked ‘what’s wrong with that?’
‘The Hamasha clan are in essence lawless criminals who in recent years wanted to give themselves an ideological angle or spin, so they became Salafi [jihadists] and began identifying with ISIS,’ [Lieberman] said. Israel is providing this clan with light weapons and assault rifles, Lieberman alleged, adding that, ‘Ultimately, these weapons will be turned against us.'”
So if Israel is working with ISIS to fight Hamas, which is ISIS, does that make Israel ISIS too?
The worst part is that Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care that this alliance with an ISIS-affiliated group in Gaza is blowing up his “Hamas is ISIS” slogan in his face. The man is shameless and he can depend on shameless Western governments and media to cover for him, while they wait to transmit his next big lie.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.
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“Uncle Farid is an Israeli-Greek dual national in his fifties. He is usually accompanied by two strong-built men in a black Jeep Cherokee.
[…]
Uncle Farid owns a licensed import-export business that he uses to broker deals between the smuggling mafias that buy [Islamic State] oil and the three oil companies that export the oil to Israel. Al-Araby has the names of these companies and details of their illegal trades. One of these companies is also supported by a very high-profile Western official. The companies compete to buy the smuggled oil and then transfer it to Israel through the Turkish ports of Mersin, Dortyol and Ceyhan.
[…]
‘Israel has in one way or another become the main marketer of IS oil. Without them, most IS-produced oil would have remained going between Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Even the three companies would not receive the oil if they did not have a buyer in Israel,’ said [an anonymously-quoted European oil] industry official.”
Source:
“Raqqa’s Rockefellers: How Islamic State Oil Flows to Israel,” Al-Araby al-Jadeed (The New Arab), Nov. 26, 2015
This is what happens when individuals are never held accountable for their actions. Binjimi has been given everything he needs to prove himself a very EVIL man and he has used it to it’s utmost impact. That the US leadership, that of the UK and others line up behind the US position makes them all cohorts in the same inhuman escapades of genocide.
We here in the US very well need a new political party, green, purple, or red, white and blue, on caps that read time to make the US respectable again.
When one’s behavior history reveals no limits to the lies they espouse intended to justify their own abhorrent, inhumane behavior civilized societies must step forward and at the very least limit the aid resulting in this evil damage.
A group that continuously lies to you is a group to be shunned until their behavior improves.
While I am not one who follows Naomi Klein’s every move I viewed her recent appearance on Democracy Now when I caught this tag line about her content – Naomi Klein on Trump, Musk, the Far Right and End Times Fascism.
It’s well worth watching.
There is a religion invented for defamation of their ignored messiah with a 2000 year history of western religious dogma along with defamation of many other cultures around the world being wiped out or stuck into reservation camps. Now they are forces to stay silent lest their history condemns them too. The moral ambivalence cannot be ignored either. We have also weaponized religions in this century like the Romans may have once done.
It was also a trick versus communism that is set loose on the world.
Wow, NinniYahoo projects his own behavior and his Zionist brethren’s behavior onto others continuously.
Do us a favour, Bibi…DROP DEAD!
It’s completely asinine to utter “Hamas” and “ISIS” in the same breath. They’re two completely different groups. Only flunky propagandists like Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro make this embarrassing and stupid juxtaposition bc they know there’s a good chance it can gain traction and play in Peoria.
ISIS essentially NEVER targeted Israel in its entire CIA-Mossad created existence.
not different groups at all, they all belong the US Terror Inc really looking into it!
I do find it interesting that my blocking of propaganda into my home means that I do not remember ever hearing this. Fascinating the effect from blocking impudent and persevering liars from my home, and my brain. For that reason, this headline made me smile. The same, self-satisfied, “its working” smile I give when I hear people talking about the latest missing blonde story, or the latest celebrity news/gossip. My blocks are working!
Even if one makes an active effort to avoid exposure to the type of content congruent with the “ISIS = Hamas” trope by limiting their engagement with certain types of news and social media (though I personally encourage people to expose themselves to reductive propagandistic narratives of all kinds, but also intentionally seek out counternarratives and nuances, to the best of their ability), I can still personally recall witnessing advertisements in the northeastern United States after Oct. 7, 2023 bearing that slogan from pro-Zionist groups renting billboard and marquee space in outdoor public spaces such as Times Square in New York City and even along the Schuylkill Expressway (Interstate 76) near Conshohocken, PA outside of Philadelphia.