The Hard Questions Masked by the Selective Outrage of Sonia Gandhi: A Reckoning with Islamism, Gaza, and the World’s Convenient Amnesia

There is a version of the Gaza story the world has agreed to tell. It is clean, photogenic, and morally uncomplicated. It requires no difficult history, no examination of ideology, and no accountability from anyone except Israel. It is also, in its comfortable incompleteness, a form of contempt for the very people it claims to champion.

This essay is not that story.

The Ideology Nobody Wants to Name

Hamas is not a resistance movement that happens to use violence. It is a theocratic totalitarian organization whose foundational charter called for the annihilation of Jews, not Israeli soldiers, not the Israeli state, but Jews, and cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a credible source. Its 2017 revised document softened some language while preserving the same eliminationist objective beneath polished diplomatic phrasing.

This matters because the global conversation about Gaza has almost entirely excised Hamas’s ideology from the frame. To name it is treated as deflection. To examine it is called victim-blaming. The result is a discourse that discusses the wounds of a conflict while refusing to examine one of the primary instruments of those wounds.

Islamism, the political project of organizing society entirely around a particular interpretation of Islamic law, enforced by the state, is not synonymous with Islam, and conflating the two is both intellectually dishonest and genuinely bigoted. But Islamism as a political force, in its Hamas variant, in its Iranian theocratic variant, in its various regional expressions, has caused extraordinary suffering to Muslim-majority populations above all others. The people most damaged by Islamist governance are not Israelis. They are the women denied education in Taliban Afghanistan, the Iranians shot in the streets for removing their hijabs, the Gazans who could not organize a political opposition without risking their lives.

The world’s reluctance to say this plainly is not solidarity with Muslims. It is condescension toward them, an assumption that Muslims cannot be held to the same standards of political........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)