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A Manifesto for Murder
(Los Angeles Times) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - * Much has been said about the Hamas charter's call for the destruction of Israel and the need for Hamas to renounce this goal as the condition for being granted international legitimacy, economic aid, and diplomatic recognition. But an examination of the charter reveals that Hamas is not just dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It shows Hamas to be governed by a Nazi-like genocidal orientation to Jews in general. * As a lifelong student of Nazism and its radical murderousness, I have always been extremely reluctant to use the epithet "Nazi" for other reprehensible, anti-Semitic, or genocidal movements. Whatever the other differences, the anti-Semitism and the murderous logic that form the principal content and rhetorical structure of this charter and this political party are unmistakably Nazi-like with regard to Jews. * Hamas' charter should not be dismissed as just words, and all that it contains would not be nullified even if Hamas, under pressure, renounced its goal to destroy Israel. Seldom in the modern world has a political party enshrined such hallucinatory hatred and overt murderousness against another people in its constitution, and more seldom still has such a party taken power. * The Nazi Party Program of 1920 also contained much anti-Semitism, but compared to Hamas' charter, its demonology and prescriptions were tame. * When political parties and political leaders speak the language of annihilation openly, we should take them at their word. The last 100 years have shown that those expressing murderous dreams, like Hitler, mean it. The writer, a member of Harvard's Center for European Studies, is the author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.