As I write this, more than one hundred, (mostly Israeli) Jews are still being held hostage. They have been imprisoned and are tortured 24/7. They are deprived of food; the males are beaten just for fun, and the girls, women, and boys are raped.

We know this thanks to Arabic language documents IDF soldiers found when they cleared out Hamas nests. The documents contain explicit instructions about how to torture and maim and the best way to kill a Jew with a knife by stabbing him in the neck and/or spine. The same orders tell the captors to keep the captured Jews on the most meager rations.

These instructions also order the captors to show no tolerance to any hostages who show even the slightest resistance or objection to doing what they are told. If they do, they must be killed.

The inhumanity of these orders illustrates the culture behind the people carrying out these cruel rituals: Domination and submission, and “oppression and humiliation,” are what the Koran demands.

Image: Muslim humiliation of female slaves in the 18th century by Charles Boulay. Public domain.

That is how Believers in the One True Faith, who hold that theirs is the correct religion of Ibrahim (whose name they chronically mispronounce), are supposed to treat Jews, and that was their relationship with Jews in their lands until 1948. For fourteen centuries, wherever Jews lived in a Muslim country, they were not citizens with rights equal to those of Muslims. They lived in ghettoes for centuries, long before that institution emerged in 16th-century Christian Europe.

Muslims view Zionism as the Jews’ impermissible rebellion against their Sharia status as dhimmi. Dhimmi must pay a hefty annual communal jezya tax for the “crime” of refusing to convert to Islam. Paying the jezya also means buying the right to continue practicing the Jewish faith for another year. Zionism, in Muslim minds, is the intifada of the Jews.

Beginning in 1968, when Muslims hijacked an El Al flight (the only time that’s ever happened) and kept Israelis hostage until Israel released 16 imprisoned terrorists, Muslims have been kidnapping Israelis, and the Israeli government has freed Muslim terrorists for their return. However, I am suspicious of the current, presumptive concern Hamas is said to feel for its brethren in Israeli prisons. The monsters of October 7 who hide behind women and children and use them as human shields will never be mistaken for their concern for others.

This ostensible “concern” for their brethren in Israeli prisons may not be the true engine powering their murderous and sadistic brutality. They don’t need that excuse. What these death cultists really want is to abuse, “oppress and humiliate,” soil, torment, horrify, and cause intense pain to Jews. To rape their boys, women, and girls, shoot them in the head at the same time, and, in the end, as the final insult, spill their seed into the corpse.

Of course, it’s possible that Yahya Sinwar may not really care all that much about freeing fellow Muslim Brothers from Israeli prisons in exchange for Israeli captives. He may want Israel to eventually understand that he will not free the captives for any price, so that the IDF will have no choice but to crash into Rafah to free the hostages and kill Sinwar and his minions. That act will turn Hamas terrorists into shahidin/martyrs, while killing thousands of non-combatant Believers.

That sacrifice is worth it because the Jews will then be painted with their victims’ blood and, in the eyes of a hostile world, will be exposed, not as Chosen People who think they are better than everyone else, but as guilty of genocide, just like the Nazis. They will be humiliated as the most evil agents of the Shaitan in the world (Arabic’s plagiarized mispronunciation of the Hebrew Sa-tanh.)

From the first day of Islam, its “prophet” plagiarized Judaism, Muslims have viewed Jews with murderous envy, worthy of an embittered, first-born son named Ishmael who lost his primacy to his younger half-brother Yitzhak when his father, the kindest man in the ancient world, expelled this violent man from the country G-d promised to Abraham’s seed.

The Koran is an antisemitic tract. The New Testament is undeniably anti-Jew but at least respects the Jewish Bible, while the Muslims dismiss it as a fraud. While both Islam and Christianity claim to be successors to Judaism, they are very different in their relationship to the parent religion. The New Testament purports to be a continuation of the Jewish people. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church calls itself Verus Israel, the true Jews.

Islam, however, claims that the Jewish Bible is bogus. Muslims deny that Moses brought the Ten Commandments down from Mt. Sinai and took dictation from the Almighty for the text of the first Five Books of the Bible. Instead, Muslims claim that Moses brought down the Koran and, when he descended from Mt. Sinai, the evil Jews snatched it away and re-wrote it.

This is how Muslims explain why the Koran contains numerous Jews and their stories, as recounted in the Jewish Bible, only re-written and changed. To explain the different versions of the same stories, Muslims say that, when Muhammad came into the world, he restored the original text (i.e., today’s Koran).

Therefore, Islam teaches that the Jews’ Five Books (Torah) are a corrupt plagiarization of the Koran. For one infamous example, Islam teaches that Avraham did not bind his son Yitzhak for a sacrifice as the Jews believe. He bound his son Isma’il (their mispronunciation), and the episode took place in Mecca. When the Jews say in the Bible that the son chosen was Yitzhak and it happened in Jerusalem, the Jews lie.

Hamas knows it has no ability to destroy Israel militarily, but it can “oppress and humiliate” Israel as the Koran demands. Hamas headmen have shamelessly said the hundreds of miles of tunnels they built are for the leadership to survive in, but surely, he also had in mind the kidnapping and raping, torture, and humiliation of the Jews, 24-7, as an end in itself. How “elated” the Muslims were, Douglas Murray said after viewing the IDF’s 47-minute video compilation of their October 7 horrors.

The great medieval Spanish Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089-1167) lived all his life surrounded by Muslims and said that Arabic, which he surely spoke perfectly, was the bad Hebrew of larcenous, illiterate, nomadic, desert brigands.

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.