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In Islamic Culture There Is No Such Concept as Defeat. It's Better to Die than Lose Face

(Ynet News) Mosab Hassan Yousef interviewed by Amir Bogen - Mosab Hassan Yousef, 47, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, defected to Israel in 1997 and moved to the U.S. in 2007, with his story revealed in his 2010 memoir, Son of Hamas. During a visit to Israel in June, he said: "Hamas has spent 37 years building momentum, and people seem to forget they [the Palestinians] voted for them. They forget they funded Hamas from their own pockets - not just Iran....It's part of their religious obligation. Businessmen too - all under the table. How do I know? Because I was in Hamas leadership. I saw where the finances came from. Average people would walk into the mosque with tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars or dinars and slip it into my father's pocket or the back seat of his car." "Of course, there are people who suffered under Hamas's iron grip in Gaza. I'm not saying there aren't. But are they any better? They all still see Israel as the common enemy. They may not agree with what Hamas did on October 7...[but] they're saying, 'It wasn't worth it.'" "In Islamic culture...there is no such concept as defeat...It's victory or death. When they lose a war, they don't see it the way the West does. We were conditioned from an early age...all of it built on a refusal to accept what really happened - that our forefathers initiated the war against Israel's independence, and they lost. But in this culture, defeat is too shameful to admit. Everything is based on honor and shame, not on right and wrong, as in Western culture....Better to die than lose face." "Palestine is a colonial construct. It's not even part of our traditional vocabulary - it's not in the Arab dictionary. 'Palestine' was a name for a region at best, not a country. As for so-called Palestinians, we don't actually have anything concrete to support our existence as a nation or an ethnicity - nothing except for this ugly flag and the keffiyeh, a scarf actually coming from Iraq....Am I really supposed to die for this falsehood? For the madness of people who thrive on corruption and violence and expect everyone else to join them?"
2025-07-17 00:00:00
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