Terrorism rebranded as ‘armed resistance against civilians’

Hamas massacring women and children is “resistance” according to Peter Beinart but, as in Africa, it is Islamist attempted “genocide” by definition and their own admission.

Peter Beinart (Photo by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Since Oct. 7, there’s been an aggressive effort to rebrand Hamas terrorism as “armed resistance.”

Now, Peter Beinart, speaking at the Harvard Divinity School, which recognizes only one deity, Allah, used a curious term of art to describe the mass murder of Jews as “Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.”

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Beinart returns to this term over and over again, describing the terrorist massacres of Jews as “Palestinian armed resistance against civilians.”

The premise of “resistance” is that at least in theory, the perpetrators are defending themselves against an attack. But what does “armed resistance against civilians” mean?

How are unarmed women and children the attackers? How is massacring them resistance rather than genocide?

The whole point of using the term “resistance” is to try to equate Islamic terrorists to the French Resistance fighting Nazis, or to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto attacking the Nazi SS.

Now “resistance” has not only been rebranded to mean killing Jews, but massacring Jewish unarmed men, women and children just going about their lives.

“Resistance” has come to be indistinguishable from Nazism. In both terms it whitewashes the religiously and politically motivated massacre of Jews.

Islamic Terrorism is not “Resistance”, it is Genocide

When Muslim terrorists began their latest massacre in Kashmir, they first checked IDs and asked their victims to recite the ‘Kalmas’ one of several Islamic recitations used by Indian Muslims, beginning with, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.”

Those who could not recite the Islamic doctrine were killed.

“Are you Muslim? If yes, then recite the Kalma,” victims were told by the Jihadis.

“He asked my husband’s name and religion. Then he shot him,” one female survivor testified.

Describing the massacre of 26 innocent people, including an American citizen, in a Kashmir meadow as terrorism is misleading. The targets were not selected because they were government officials. They were not screened for their politics. The location was not a strategic target. The only thing that the victims had in common was that they were non-Muslims.

This is not terrorism. It’s genocide.

Muslim terrorists have followed the same protocol for screening out and exterminating non-Muslims. During the Westgate Mall Massacre in Nairobi, the Muslim terrorists killed over 60 people after asking their victims to name Mohammed’s mother or recite the “Shahada’, the Islamic creed, with the same premise as the ‘Kalma’ to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. The dead included children as young as eight killed for not being Muslim.

Al-Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that carried out the attack, stated that their Jihadis or “Mujahideen carried out a meticulous vetting process at the mall and have taken every possible precaution to separate the Muslims from the Kuffar before carrying out their attack.”

By ‘Kuffar’ they mean infidels or non-Muslims.

The Jihadist group had done the same thing at Garissa College in Kenya, first attacking a Christian morning prayer group and then going door to door asking students if they were Christians or Muslims, and then demanding that those who claimed to be Muslims recite the Islamic Shahada. “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot,”

“We sorted people out and released the Muslims,” Al-Shabab announced and massacred 147 Christian students.

The terrorist group did the same thing at villages on the Kenyan coast where dozens were killed in a number of attacks accompanied by religious tests. “They ordered all of us to get out of the house, and then asked us to recite ‘shahada’.” one man recalled.

Those same tactics were used by Boko Haram in its genocide of Christians in Nigeria.

During a terrorist attack in Bangladesh, terrorists took over a cafe before the Islamic period of Ramadan, and massacred 22 people. Muslims and non-Muslims were separated. Suspected non-Muslims were asked to recite verses from the Koran. The Muslims sat and ate in one section while the non-Muslims were being tortured and murdered to cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

The dead included a number of Japanese tourists and an American citizen who was murdered for not being Muslim. The victims were not killed for their politics, many were tourists, but for being non-Muslims. This was not terrorism. It was ethnic cleansing and a religious massacre.

When Abu Sayyaf Jihadis took over the city of Marawi in the Philippines, they “gave civilians a de facto religious test prior to killing them; they were asked to recite the Shahada… civilians who did not recite the Shahada or failed to respond appropriately were often summarily executed.”

Christians were shot or had their throats cut. Others were taken hostage. The men were forced to help the terrorists while the women were used as sex slaves.

This is not ‘terrorism’. It’s ethnic and tribal warfare whose goal is to kill or enslave members of other groups. The ultimate aim of Islamic Jihad is not a change of government, but genocide.

Terrorism is a western concept that was transplanted to the Muslim world by the Soviet Union. Moscow trained groups like the PLO were taught some of the same tactics utilized by the USSR’s networks of Marxist terrorist organizations, but the old Marxist groups in the Muslim world have long since become either Islamized or irrelevant, and the Islamist groups utilize some terror tactics within the larger context of the Jihad, but only as part of their traditional conquest of non-Muslims.

Marxist terrorism is political while Muslim terrorism is identitarian supremacism. Jihadists do not care what form a government takes as long as it abides by Islamic law. Their ideological programs mix bits and pieces of capitalism and socialism with little regard for any consistency. Their mission is to ensure that their religion, Islam, and ethnic group, conquers the country. Everything else is a minor detail. That’s why even ISIS allowed self-government in captured cities. It’s why Hamas has kept Gaza dependent on Israeli services and allowed the PLO to run some of its bureaucracy. The Jihad does not care about who actually fills out the paperwork.

Islamic terrorists don’t limit their attacks to the government. They focus them on non-Muslims. A meadow in Kashmir, a music festival in Israel, a theater in Paris or a school in Africa are all fair game because the overriding objective is the extermination and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

An 8-year-old in a Kenya mall is a target not because he’s a means of taking over the government, the way traditional terrorists do, but because every single infidel is an enemy.

Apologists for Islamic terrorism want to pretend that these are all local political conflicts motivated by local human rights abuses. They insist that what motivates Hamas in Gaza, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram in Africa, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen in Bangladesh and a litany of other Muslim terror groups in other areas are local matters, that they don’t share any global aims or an overriding ideology, and that their concerns have to be addressed by removing or reforming local governments.

But a movement that massacres members of other groups wholesale is not looking for political change. Killing anyone who isn’t a Muslim is not about the form of government, but religious and ethnic supremacism, and a genocide taking place on a scale so large we can no longer see it.

The Islamic Jihad against non-Muslims is far worse than Rwanda or all the African genocides put together because it is a worldwide phenomenon being practiced on every major populated continent. After over a thousand years of butchery in which tens of millions were killed, raped or enslaved, entire cultures and peoples were wiped out, it remains the greatest threat to humanity.

Dismissing the Islamic Jihad against human civilization as terrorism obscures the scale and horror of the threat. What we call terrorism is really the mass killing of non-Muslims.

It’s not terrorism. It’s genocide.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

May 12, 2025 | 4 Comments »

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4 Comments / 4 Comments

  1. Following Hitler’s Playbook
    The more things change…
    Ted Belman
    Jun 13, 2008 at 1:46 AM (GMT+3)
    Ted Belman
    Arabs play offense while Israelis play defense. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of propaganda.

    But first I want to look at the negotiations. Can anyone tell me what the Israelis are demanding? I’m waiting.

    On the other hand,the Arabs are demanding the holy city in Jerusalem, the Green Line as the border and the “right of return”. It seems Israel is always struggling to meet their demands in part, hoping it will suffice. No such
    Can anyone tell me what the Israelis are demanding?
    struggle on the part of the Arabs; just the reiteration of their demands. They have a sense of entitlement, while the Israelis have a sense of indebtedness. That’s no way to win a ball game.

    The Arabs always rejected the State of Israel and in the seventies made a conscious decision to convince the world to do likewise. So, they began a propaganda war to demonize and delegitimize Israel and Zionism. The infamous Zionism is Racism resolution at the UN was the first volley.

    David Matas, famed human rights lawyer from Canada, in his excellent book Aftershock, written in 2002, reviewed the attacks on Jews and Israel throughout the world, and asked: How could this happen sixty years after the Holocaust? He answers:

    “The root cause of the revival of antisemitism is anti-Zionism. Zionism is the expression of the right to self determination of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism, by definition, denies and rejects this right by denying the right to a state by the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism is a form of racism. It is the specific denial to the Jewish people of the basic right to which all people of the world are entitled.

    “Israel exists because of the Holocaust, because of anti-Semitism and as a place of refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, for the cultural survival of the Jewish people and their right to self-determination, because of the ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, and because of international acceptance and recognition. The logic of anti-Zionism requires attacking each and every one of these reasons for the existence of Israel.”
    Thus, the Holocaust is denied or trivialized and the creation of Israel is discredited as Western colonialism or a “mistake”, if you will. In addition, the Arabs have created a narrative to compete with the Jewish narrative. The Arabs deny that both the First and Second Temples were located at or near the Temple Mount. In their narrative, they have the roots and rights in and to the land and the Jews have virtually no connection to it. They also deny the peoplehood of the Jews, while at the same time claiming their own and their right to self-determination.

    Beyond that, Arabs attack the Jews for all the worst crimes known to man. Their charges are not at all based in reality. It doesn’t matter if there is any evidence to support them, nor that they are outrageous or perverse. They will distort facts or fraudulently present “facts” to support their allegations. They also misrepresent the law in order to more easily conclude that Israelis have committed a crime, or better still, a war crime.

    The list of “crimes” include: perpetrating genocide or another holocaust; ethnic cleansing; the commission of war crimes for disproportionality; intentionally killing innocents; and creating an humanitarian disaster. Anti-Zionists are relentless in stigmatizing Israel as an Apartheid state, so that they can create a worldwide movement to delegitimizeIsrael similar to the movement that undermined the real Apartheid regime, South Africa. And to do this, the reality and the nature of the Apartheid regime are distorted and falsified.

    Anti-Israel lies also include the following:

    the occupation is illegal;
    the settlements are illegal;
    Judea and Samaria are Palestinian lands;
    Israel is the aggressor ;
    Jerusalem is holy to Islam;
    the Arabs support a two-state solution; and
    the Jews want to take over the world pursuant to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
    David Matas and others have convincingly debunked all of these lies. But the Arabs follow the Nazi Goebbels’ dictum to a ‘T’:

    “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

    The Arabs follow the Nazi Goebbels’ dictum to a ‘T’.

    The phrase “the big lie” was also used in a report prepared during World War II by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler’s psychological profile:

    “His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

    This, too, Arabs follow carefully. Its only natural, since Haj Amin al-Husseini, the father of militant Palestinian Arab nationalism, a previously unknown concept, was a close confidant of Hitler and asked of him to acknowledge the Arab right “to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs, and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.”

    Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

    What the Israeli government must do is to challenge every one of the anti-Jewish lies at every opportunity. That’s what its PR should be about and not about the babes on the beach. That is playing offense.

    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/336625

  2. From Hillel Fuld May 14, 2021 posted on FB group “Jewish people/ (looks like Greek) ” by Svetlana Dechter

    The world, as we know it, has officially lost it.

    Black is white, white is black. Right is wrong, wrong is right. Day is night, night is day.

    It is truly unreal to see all the hate for Israel on the internet. It’s not unreal that so many people hate Jews. We’re used to that. It’s also not unreal that so many people side with the Arabs who don’t have to stick to the truth, and therefore have much better PR than us, since our side doesn’t lie.

    What is unreal is the amount of misinformation and straight up lies that are circulating on the internet. I’m not only talking about this latest “Round” of fighting. I’m talking in general.

    The first and most obvious lie being spread by people who are critical of Israel is that it’s not a fair fight. I’m talking about major celebrities and talk show hosts who are spreading this poison to their audience of millions.

    “There are many more casualties on the ‘Palestinian’ side. Israel is much stronger so it has to show restraint”

    So let me get this straight. If there were more dead Jews, then you’d be ok with Israel defending herself but since we developed incredible technology to detonate rockets in mid air, since only a few Jews have been killed, we aren’t allowed to defend ourselves? Do you even hear what you’re saying?! You need more dead Jews first before you grant us the right to self defense?!

    Furthermore, show me one other war/conflict in which the number of casualties determines the validity of the war. Was WWII justified? Did Germany not lose many many more lives than those who attacked them in order to uproot the evil of the Nazi regime? I’ll go one step further. Do you have any idea how many innocent Germans were killed in WWII? Does that make the war unjustified?

    “No, they weren’t innocent. They elected Hitler to lead them. They deserved to suffer the consequences.”

    So if a nation elects a psychopathic regime to lead them, attacking them to uproot the evil is justified? See where I’m going with this?

    The Arabs in Gaza democratically elected Hamas, a terror organization to lead them. Need I say more?

    Ok, next lie. “The Palestinians deserve the right to self determination. They deserve a state. Until they have one, they won’t stop.”

    Ok, let’s dissect. Can you guess how many times the Arabs had a chance to have a state? One? No. Two? Nope. Three? Negative. Four?! Keep going. Five? That is correct. They had five chances and they rejected them all. Why, you ask?

    How about because they don’t want a state?! Have you ever reviewed the charter of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)?

    “Article 2 of the Charter states that ?Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit?, meaning that there is no place for a Jewish state.”

    They don’t want a state. They say it loud and clear. They want no Israel. It’s time we took their word.

    The irony here is actually humorous. The very same people who support the Arab’s cause are the very same people who treat the Arabs like little children who can’t think for themselves. “They say from the river to the sea? Na, they don’t mean it!” They are embracing terror as their primary vehicle to advance their cause? Well, they’re suffering so what choice do they have? How can you blame them?”

    Um, how about act like an adult and stop stomping your feet and crying like a little toddler? I mean there are many under privileged people out there. There are many poor people, sick people, sad people. Do any of them blow themselves up or shoot rockets at women and children? Somehow with these Arabs it’s ok, because they’re “Suffering”.

    Of course the fact that their suffering has anything to do with their terror is another lie. Ari’s 17 year old murderer came from an affluent and financially stable family.

    The next lie being spread is that Israel is indiscriminately killing women and children. See, when you are blinded by hatred, facts don’t matter.

    Israel is doing significantly more than ANY other army in the world to minimize innocent Arab deaths. The issue is that our enemies are literally setting up their terror headquarters in hospitals! They are literally making women and children stand next to them as they fire rockets into Israel. So yes, there are many innocent casualties on their side. Whose fault is that? Exhibit A: Hamas.

    Let’s just address one more lie, even though there are about 20 more lies being told right now on the internet. If you have another historical fabrication that you want addressed, feel free to comment below and I’ll try to address it.

    So one more lie. “Israel stole land from the Palestinians. They have to give back those stolen homes.”

    Words matter and calling them Palestinians when that term was literally made up by the terrorist, Yasser Arafat, is inaccurate and not helpful. They are Arabs.

    So about that lie. We occupied the Palestinian state, stole their homes, and killed their children.

    When? Serious question. When? In my history book, the UN gave us and them a state in 1948. They didn’t accept and attacked us. We whipped their tuchuses.

    So when did we occupy the so-called Arab Palestinian state?

    Don’t bother Googling because it’s a huge global lie. There never was an Arab Palestinian state. Ever. Those Arabs who call themselves Palestinians? Please go ahead and ask them when their Palestinian state was established. Please ask them to tell you ANYTHING about this so-called state we occupied.

    News flash: You can’t occupy your own land.

    I feel like I just scratched the surface here and there are so many more lies being circulated right now on the internet.

    I guess I’ll just say one more thing. Jews value life. We believe all humans were created in the image of GD. We sanctify life and do everything we can to defend and preserve it. Do you have any idea how much every iron dome missile costs us?

    Each battery of the Iron Dome costs about $100 million. And each individual missile? $50,000. But for us, Human life > All the money in the world!

    Our enemies? They glorify death. While we build highly advanced technology to deflect rockets in real time, they use the billions they got from the US, the EU, and yes, even from Israel (Because we are idiots and compassionate to those who deserve no compassion!) to build highly advanced attack tunnels that start in Gaza and end in Jewish towns. They don’t plan on using these tunnels to deliver candy to Israeli kids. And of course, much of that foreign aid money goes to building those tens of thousands of rockets raining down on our heads.

    Golda Meir famously said “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

    Truer words have never been spoken.

    What other lies are there?

  3. Kuffar – or kaffir – means faithless in the same way that the Easter service referred to Jews as “perfidious.”
    Whilst about the sins of the sons of the Prophet, the entire Moslem system of protected people ie Christians and Jews is second class dhimmi status and so apartheid and as Jizya tax is involved to pay for the protection it is a racket into tthe bargain.