Until last week it had not occurred to me that Rotary and Lions clubs might be an arm of the international Jewish conspiracy.
Like most people, I suspect I’ve always assumed these organisations exist to give the well-meaning but socially awkward a chance to get out of the house and raise money for good causes.
But, in the wake of the unspeakable horrors visited – yet again – upon the Jewish people in Israel, I have learned that this may not be so.
To get an idea about what motivates people who would behead babies in recent days, I sat down to wade through Hamas’s founding charter – released in 1988.
From the way foreigners write airily about the ways in which Israel might solve its Palestinian problem – through “the peace process” involving some kind of “land-for-peace deal” and “two-state solution” – one could be forgiven for forgetting how implausible these outcomes are when you actually get to grips with Hamas’s world view.
A quick skim of its charter makes it clear that Jew hatred isn’t some kind of rhetorical bolted-on extra that can be dumped when necessary.
Jews, the Hamas charter explains, have for centuries been planning, skilfully and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained – amassing great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their aims.
“With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there,” it says.
With their money, it goes on, they formed secret societies around the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests, including the “Freemasons” as well as the aforementioned “Rotary Clubs, the Lions”.
As you might have guessed, Hamas reckons Jews were behind World War I because it gave them the chance to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, obtain the Balfour Declaration, and create the League of Nations “through which they could rule the world”.
More surprisingly, given the catastrophe which befell them during it, Hamas thinks Jews were behind World War II, a war in which “they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments and paved the way for the establishment of their state”.
Jews were also responsible for the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council. Why? To “enable them to rule the world” of course. “There is,” it explains “no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.”
So while Hamas might be an Islamist organisation, aside from the local twist about the Caliphate and the Balfour Declaration, its obsession with the evil of Jews down the centuries is more or less indistinguishable from the Nazis.
People will say that Hamas’s views aren’t necessarily the view of the people they rule. But it’s also the case that although the last Palestinian elections were held as long ago as 2006, Hamas got 44 per cent of the vote.
What sort of peace can a Jewish state ever hope to achieve with people who believe such things?
Progressive opinion in the West has been moving steadily from claiming there is a moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies to an acceptance of the idea that at its core Israel is a racist, colonialist experiment that ought to fail.
It would be too much to dream that last week’s events would have exposed this for the absurdity that it is.
Originally published as Campbell: Hamas’ obsession with Jews indistinguishable from Nazis