Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah agree: Hey, these students protesting against Israel are terrific

Praise from a murderous jihad terror group should give the self-righteous pro-Hamas students pause.

By Robert Spencer, Frontpage Magazine

Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows, but there is nothing really strange about this at all: two jihad terrorist groups, al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, have declared how pleased they are that students all over the United States are protesting, with so much youthful energy and arrogance, against Israel.

And why not? If Israel fails to achieve its goal of destroying Hamas, it will be a major victory for the forces of jihad worldwide. Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah will be the beneficiaries as much as Hamas and all the other jihad groups everywhere.

Al-Qaeda started out by praising Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis: “We were happy, and every Muslim was happy, with these revenge attacks and operations carried out by the youth of the Islamic nation, especially the heroes of the revenge action in the land of Canaan.”

Revenge attacks? When did Israel carry out mass abductions and rapes of Palestinian Arab women? Never, of course, but al-Qaeda and other jihadis, as well as their leftist sympathizers and enablers, relentlessly claim that Hamas was simply retaliating after decades of oppression.

There is no truth to this whatsoever. Every last Israeli left Gaza in 2005, and the Gazans were completely free to make their green and pleasant land into a new French Riviera.

Instead, they turned it into a jihad base, with a staggeringly complex array of terror tunnels and frequent rocket attacks against the Jewish state.

Those rocket attacks, as well as the billionaire status of Hamas leaders, also demonstrated the falsehood of the oft-repeated claim that Gaza was an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp.”

Did the inmates of Buchenwald, Dachau or Auschwitz fire rockets into National Socialist Germany? Did prominent Jews enrich themselves in the camps to the extent that they became among the richest men in the world?

Also, al-Qaeda casts the Oct. 7 massacre as “revenge” because of Islamic theology. In classic Sunni theology and law, only the caliph, the successor of Muhammad as the ruler of all Muslims worldwide, is authorized to declare offensive jihad.

Yet there has been no caliph since the secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate in 1924.

But all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree that when a non-Muslim force enters a Muslim land, defensive jihad becomes the individual obligation of every Muslim (fard ‘ayn) rather than a collective obligation of the entire umma, and need not be declared by anyone.

So if Hamas was simply exacting “revenge” and defending itself, the implication is that all Muslims have the obligation to join Hamas’ jihad.

In line with this, al-Qaeda goes on to say: “We call on the youth of our nation,” that is, the umma, the global Islamic nation, transcending all national boundaries, “to follow this blessed path…outpace them with the number of operations and the force of strikes and to fill the hearts of the children of Zion with terror in retaliation for the blood of our oppressed people in Gaza.”

Then al-Qaeda praises the student jihad sympathizers and leftist dupes who have come out for Hamas: “While we support the assassination of the infidel Zionists and the beheading of them, we also appreciate and value the movement of Western demonstrators and sit-in students from Western universities, who through their sit-ins and protests expressed their rejection of the genocide taking place in Gaza.”

Praise from a murderous jihad terror group should give the self-righteous pro-Hamas students pause, and make them reconsider their fanatical hatred of Israel.

But it won’t. Nor are they likely to be dissuaded from their path by similar praise from Hezbollah. Hezbollah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem was enthusiastic, saying:

“When the American people take a stand in support of Gaza … we salute and applaud them. We appreciate and value this very much. … The [campus protests] are important, especially because they will have an impact on the U.S. elections. They will have an impact on the American position. Even if Biden says that he will not be influenced by this, he will whether he likes it or not. We will see him taking actions because of the protesters’ influence on him.”

Qassem need not worry. Old Joe Biden is clearly influenced by the protests, as well as pressure from leftist and Muslim leaders, and that’s why he has been so energetically betraying Israel of late.

Applause from al-Qaeda and Hezbollah won’t turn Old Joe and his henchmen from the course of action they have chosen, either. After all, by now they’re used to siding with America’s enemies.

Al-QaedaAmerican college campusesanti-Israel demonstratorsencampmentsHezbollah