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However much Donald Trump, 47th President of the United States, and inarguably the most powerful man on the planet, might storm and shout, he stands defeated by Muslim extremism unless he can keep his promise to disarm Hamas if the organisation doesn’t voluntarily disarm.Good luck to Mr Trump. He will need it. Despite two years of a blistering Israeli offensive that killed over 68,000 Palestinian men, women and children, to say nothing of nearly 2,000 Israeli fatalities, and left the Gaza Strip a ruin, Hamas, which glories in the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, remains as defiant as ever. Whatever 456 million Arabs in the 22 Arab League member states really feel about Hamas usurping supreme authority in West Asia, even the wealthiest oil-rich monarch is publicly as acquiescent as the humblest fellaheen. No one dare oppose Hamas and its militant interpretations of Islam to spearhead a fierce movement committed to destroying Israel.No other religion has produced an equivalent. Yes, the British would not have executed 150 saffron-clad rebels in 1771 if Bengal’s Sannyasi rebellion had not threatened the Raj. The Crusaders fought valiantly for centuries to regain Christianity’s Holy Land. But neither Hindus nor Christians boasted of the organised fervour that has sustained Hamas since it was born in December 1987 as a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, proclaiming in its very first public statement: “Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.”Since then, Hamas has distanced itself from the Palestine Liberation Organisation -- the umbrella group for disparate Palestinian factions including militant Marxists and secular nationalists -- under the aged Mahmoud Abbas, who is ceremonially honoured as a fictive Palestine’s second President. Instead of being subservient to Israel, Hamas propagates resistance as jihad and exalts martyrdom. Predominantly Shia Iran is accused of arming, training and funding the group.Not content with ploughing its own revolutionary furrow, Hamas also urges the other two Abrahamic faiths -- Judaism and Christianity -- to accept Islamic rule in West Asia. “It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror”, it warns. Hamas might lie low at the moment but rejects any proposal for peace or coexistence with the Jewish state. “Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavours”, it declares. “The Palestinian people know better than to consent to having their future, rights and fate toyed with.” Hamas guards the future.Founded in the early days of the first Intifada uprising amid Palestinian fury over Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, its original covenant was largely the handiwork of a quadriplegic and partially blind cleric, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, whom the Israelis assassinated with a missile strike on March 22, 2004 in Gaza City.The first Intifada raged until 1993, when Yasser Arafat signed a partial peace agreement with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House. Hamas rejected the Oslo Accords and as the peace process deadlocked, deployed suicide bombers against Israeli targets. A second Intifada erupted in 2000 after Israel claimed sovereignty over Islam’s third holiest site in Jerusalem but ended in 2005, after Israel unilaterally terminated its occupation of Gaza.Hamas ran openly for legislative elections for the first time in 2006, and won the largest number of seats in the Palestine legislature. A year later it wrested physical control of Gaza, thereby cementing its rule over an area of about 141 square miles on the Mediterranean coast. Hamas has sometimes sounded contradictory since then -- calling for the liberation of all the lands that were historic Palestine but also indicating a willingness to live alongside another state based on the post-1967 war borders.But the focus remains on “the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital … with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus”. It also distinguishes between Jews or Judaism and modern Zionism which it calls the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project. Shorn of some of the anti-Semitic language of the 1988 charter, the document that replaced it did not mention the parent organisation, the Muslim Brotherhood.After Hamas’s deadly offensive against Israel on October 7, 2023, Ismail Haniyeh, who became the organisation’s head in exile, again invoked religious rhetoric. “Today, the enemy has had a political, military, intelligence, security and moral defeat inflicted upon it, and we shall crown it, with the grace of God, with a crushing defeat that will expel it from our...
