In any sane world, it would be dismissed as grotesque fantasy: Hamas – the Iranian-backed terror group responsible for the 7 October massacre – petitioning British courts to lift its designation as a terrorist organisation. But this is one of those times it seems the entire world has gone mad.
For here we are, in Great Britain, witnessing Hamas, aided by British lawyers, seeking to launder its blood-soaked record under the false banners of ‘liberation’ and ‘resistance’. This is not mere absurdity. It is a direct assault on the integrity of British democracy – and on very survival of western civilisation.
While our principles of justice rightly insist that all individuals are entitled to legal representation, we must as a society avoid at all costs giving legitimacy to groups which openly seek the destruction of the very freedoms they exploit.
Hamas’s legal challenge frames it as a Palestinian Islamic liberation movement rather than a terrorist entity. Yet its founding charter, issued in 1988, remains a naked manifesto of genocidal intent. It declares all of Israel an Islamic trust to be reclaimed through jihad, rejects any negotiation, and traffics in classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Hamas has never renounced this charter, nor tempered its actions. From the suicide bombings of the 1990s, to the relentless rocket barrages against Israeli civilians, to the mass rapes, murders and kidnappings of 7 October, Hamas has been unwavering in its purpose: the annihilation of Jews and the eradication of the western-style democracy of the state of Israel.
This legal farce echoes earlier attempts by terrorist groups to scrub away their infamy. In 2014, Hamas briefly succeeded in challenging its European Union terrorist listing – but only on a technicality, arguing that media reports, rather than formal investigations, were cited as evidence. That brief technical reprieve was swiftly reversed, and Hamas remains listed as a terrorist group across the EU, the US, the UK and much of the free world. Elsewhere, political folly proved even more costly: in 2021, President Joe Biden removed the Houthis from America’s list of terrorist organisations, only for them to escalate attacks on civilians soon thereafter. President Trump later reinstated their designation, rightly recognising that appeasing Islamic terrorist groups only fuels their savagery.
The roots of Hamas’s terrorist enterprise run deep. Founded as an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas emerged in 1987 through the Mujama al-Islamiya, an Islamist social network built by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Far from being a grassroots national liberation movement, Hamas was from the outset a project of religiously inspired totalitarianism. It fused the Brotherhood’s ideology with armed jihad, constructing a sophisticated apparatus of violence and indoctrination that weaponised Palestinian suffering for political gain.
For Hamas, ‘resistance’ is not merely a means to an end; it is the end. Palestinian nationalism itself has long been intertwined with the language of religiously justified ‘resistance’ against Jewish sovereignty in any form. Even the ostensibly secular Fatah and the PLO historically sanctified violence, with leaders invoking Islamic references to frame their struggle. The unifying thread, across factions and decades, has been a zero-sum rejection of Jewish self-determination, particularly in the historical land of Israel.
The stakes are far greater than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Hamas’s attempt to portray itself today as a political movement wronged by western injustice is not merely dishonest – it is part of a broader strategy of political Islam to manipulate and subvert western democratic systems. Britain’s legal tradition, based on due process and freedom of speech, is being cynically weaponised by an organisation that would, given the chance, dismantle those very freedoms.
If Britain’s courts even entertain this petition seriously, it will mark a catastrophic failure of moral clarity. To dignify this case would be to spit on the memory of Hamas’s countless victims and to invite further assaults upon our own society.
The stakes are far greater than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not about one group, nor one distant war. If we allow Hamas to succeed in this grotesque charade, we will have surrendered the very principles that make Britain – and the broader free world – worth defending.
Unless Britain, and the West more broadly, acts with resolve to repel the hijacking of our systems by political Islam, we will erode our own defences from within. Survival does not rest on indulging whichever cause claims to suffer most visibly or shouts most loudly. It depends on defending the core values of our civilisation against those who would weaponise them against us.
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