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On November 27, 2024, at four in the morning in the Holy Land, the government of Israel agreed to cease attacking the Shiite Muslims in southern Lebanon. At the end of the speech explaining the plan to the people of Israel, PM Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel has a “sacred mission of releasing our hostages,” using religious language befitting a region famous for its religions.

Indeed, the oldest book still in use in the world, the Jewish Bible, contains arguably the oldest record of hostage-taking. Abraham, the progenitor of the Jewish people, had a nephew named Lot. Lot was living not in Sodom but nearby when an alliance of five communities warred against an alliance of four. During the fight, Lot was kidnapped (Genesis 14:14-15).

His kidnappers, who were spiritual forebearers of today’s PLO and other Muslim terrorists, carried him beyond Damascus. His uncle, Abraham, though the kindest man in the world that year, 1,713 BCE, was no wimp. He was the pastor of a community of hundreds who believed in him and his conception of the One G-d. Abraham chose 318 able-bodied males to race north with him. Once there, he divided his forces and, in a clever, night-time hostage rescue raid, routed the kidnappers and rescued Lot.

Images: Christians kidnapped by Muslim Barbary pirates (1817). Public domain.

And let us not forget the thousand-year history in the Middle East of the misnamed “Barbary Pirates,” who were, in truth, not pirates at all. Instead, they were the official fleets of North African ports, all of whom flew not the black and white Skull & Bones but the green flag of Islam. That is, they were Muslims whose principal occupation was hijacking infidels, mostly Christians, and enslaving the passengers and crews until ransomed.

The 76-year history of the modern State of Israel is also stained with the blood that Arab terrorists drew from numerous atrocities, including capturing Israeli citizens to trade them for their brethren in Israeli prisons.

The “Palestinians” didn’t limit themselves to taking only Israelis. In the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, Arab sky pirates were “frequent fliers” in order to skyjack commercial airliners containing all kinds of people. The IDF’s famous hostage rescue mission to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976 began with the skyjacking of an Air France plane. Half the people on board were neither Israelis nor Jews.

The Sages of the Jewish people, the rabbis of the Talmud, noticed that in the Ten Commandments, the command “Thou shall not steal” is grouped with murder and adultery, even though, commonly, most stealing does not compare in severity to those two major sins. Because the Five Books of Moses contain a second iteration of “Thou shall not steal,” the Sages ruled this iteration refers to common theft, but in the Decalogue, “Thou shall not steal” means people—that is, “Thou shalt not kidnap people.”

Every airliner Arab sky pirates ever skyjacked was a kidnapping. The American Hostage Crisis with Iran in 1979-1981 was a kidnapping. 9-11 was the simultaneous kidnapping of passengers in four airliners.

On October 18, 2024, in The Hague, even as the International Criminal Court’s dullard “jurists” were accusing Israel of starving “Palestinians” (a double lie—there is nothing Palestinian about the UNRWA freeloaders in Gaza), the ICC’s beloved “victims” of the allegedly criminal Israelis were actually starving scores of Israelis and others to death in the tunnel dungeons that Hamas dug in Gaza just for this purpose. On September 1, 2024, when six Jewish hostages were found murdered after 11 months in those same tunnels, their bodies were so emaciated that they resembled those of the “walking skeletons” that Allied soldiers in 1945 encountered in the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

There is something about Islam that lacks human empathy. Muslims see nothing wrong with kidnapping total strangers who have done nothing wrong to them and then torturing, violently raping, mutilating, and starving to death those same people, all the while justifying this behavior in the name of their religion—a religion that has as its name the Arabic word for “submission.”

A Muslim’s mission in life is the jihad, which is all about destroying all the religions in the world because they are all wrong. Islam is the correct religion, and Believers have an obligation to make infidels submit to conversion to the correct faith. And for the sake of their jihad, Muslims license themselves to commit the most heinous and diabolical cruelties imaginable.

Make no mistake: the Muslims in Gaza who did what they did on October 7, 2023, and continue to do to their captives, are not “patriotic freedom fighters” yearning for the fairy tale dream of a Two-State Solution. Their dream is to kill the Jews because they believe that Jews have no right to rule where Muslims ruled for twelve of the last fourteen centuries. In Muslim minds, Zionism is the intifada (uprising) of the Jews who have no right to govern as a majority over a minority of Believers in the One True Faith. Their inferior status is found in the Koran, which commands Muslims to “oppress and humiliate” them.

This is what the violence against Israel is all about. “Hamas” is actually an acronym for Islamic Resistance Organization, whose rival in Gaza is called Islamic Jihad, with nothing “Palestinian” about either name.

Winston Churchill, as a young combat officer, fought Muslims in Afghanistan. Based on that experience, he wrote the following:

Every influence, every motive that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword—the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men—stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.

Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property [rampant banditry, sbt] that exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith…

This is what the misnamed Israel-Palestinian Conflict is really all about.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.