On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a religious, "holy" war against Israel, known as Jihad.

The principle of Jihad rejects all laws of the Old World of infidels and calls for a revolutionary struggle for the triumph of Islam. At the same time, Jihad is interpreted as the use of violence in various forms to achieve a religious ideal.

Hamas called this war the Al Aqsa Flood after the name of Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque.

This war was not started under the slogan of liberating Palestine, but as a war with a religious goal at its core.

Hamas is a Sunni organization belonging to the Muslim Brothers current.  The goal of the Muslim Brothers is to remove non-Islamic governments and establish Islamic rule on a worldwide scale by recreating a Great Islamic Caliphate. The terrorist organization Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brothers, has turned the Palestinian struggle into a religious struggle. Hamas's goal is not so much the creation of a Palestinian state as the destruction of the Jewish state, which is an obstacle to the establishment of a Great Islamic Caliphate.

Hamas is dissolving the Palestinian struggle into a sea of Islam. Instead of reinforcing national motives, it makes the Palestinian national movement a small insignificant but extremist factor in Islam's struggle against secular rule. The confluence of a Palestinian rivulet into the mighty river of Islam means little to that religion's victory march. Instead of the long-anticipated victory over Israel, the Arab world has received in the form of Hamas fanatics, whom it has been fighting for decades in its territories and who threaten the existence and sustainability of the regimes of secular, moderate Arab countries.  From a banner and symbol of the struggle against Israel, the Palestinians have become part of the conflict between the secular and the religious in the Arab world.

According to Arab propaganda, Jewry is only a religion, not a nation. Therefore, Hamas is waging a religious, "holy" war, a Jihad, against Israel. The day after Hamas' aggression, the Shiite terrorist organization Hezb'allah began military action against Israel. Since this Shiite organization is also a religious organization, and it too, in fact, is waging a "holy" war, a Jihad against Israel.  Unlike Hamas, which seeks to export a Sunni Islamic revolution, Hezb'allah is busy exporting a Shiite Islamic revolution, the ideology of which contradicts that of Hamas, which Hezb'allah considers heretics. In its 1985 manifesto, Hezb'allah stated that its primary goal was the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Western influence in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah's goal is the widespread establishment of an Iranian-type Islamic regime. Hezb'allah's version of fundamentalism incorporates the principles of Iran's Islamic ideology, including an emphasis on fighting secularism.

Thus, both organizations are waging a religious war with Israel in which there can be no compromise, for such wars are regarded as God-ordained wars that do not allow deals with Allah. Such wars can only be stopped by destroying the aggressors. The Western method of fighting such wars, based on stopping hostilities through negotiations and treaties, does not work here. Belief in the Western "progressive" resolution of such conflicts is an illusion, a wishful thinking. This illusion does not dissipate despite the chain reaction of violence against Israel in the Middle East and its affiliates on other continents since October 7, 2023. 

Although the wars in the Middle East are still categorized as "conventional" (non-nuclear) wars, they represent humanity's distant past in which religious wars raged. These wars are not just being waged by terrorist organizations without adhering to any civilized methods of warfare, they are funded by criminal sources. In addition to the flow of petrodollars going to terrorists from Iran and Qatar, they support their religious wars in ways that are gross violations of the law in any country.

One way of financing terror in Lebanon is through drugs. Since the 1970s, Lebanon has been one of the world's leading drug producers. By 1997, the civil war had virtually destroyed all other areas of the economy, but marijuana production became the dominant import, involving almost every ethnic community and force active in Lebanon. It is Hezb'allah that controls the Bekaa Valley, where a large percentage of the country's plantations are concentrated.

Since the 1980s, Hezb'allah sympathizers have been involved in cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia, in the triple border zone where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet, and eventually in Venezuela and other parts of South America. There have also also indications of Hezb'allah's ties to the Mexican Los Zetas cartel, which shipped up to $200 million worth of cocaine to the United States every month.

Hezb'allah's spiritual leader believes that "drug trafficking is morally acceptable if the drugs are sold to Western infidels as part of the war against the enemies of Islam."

However, Hezbollah's secretary general has repeatedly denied involvement in drug production, although supporters of the organization have been apprehended with large amounts of contraband around the world at various times over the years. Hezb'allah, which is one of the world's leaders in the manufacture and sale of drugs, is officially part of Lebanon's parliament and government. Israel's neighbor Lebanon, is a country run by terrorists and drug dealers.

Hezb'allah's sponsor and spiritual leader, the Islamic Republic of Iran, has repeatedly declared its desire to destroy Israel, a U.N. member state.

This state is doing everything in its power to achieve this goal. However, the U.N., which was created to bring peace to the world, passes many times more resolutions blaming Israel than Iran. Since 2006, the U.N. General Assembly has adopted 297 anti-Israel resolutions out of a total of 761 resolutions, a 39% rate.

During that time it has passed only two (!) anti-Iran resolutions, which is 0.26%. This data shows that the U.N. considers Israel 150 times more dangerous to "world peace" than nuclear Iran, the organizer and mastermind of world terror. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has organized terrorist activities in Germany, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kenya, Bahrain, Turkey, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, U.S.A., Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, North Caucasus, Algeria, Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan, Tunisia, Philippines, Albania, India and Israel.  Iran is in the business of exporting the Islamic Shiite revolution to the world. Its imperial efforts will soon be supported by the manufacture of nuclear bombs. But Israel continues to be regarded as the perturber of tranquility and peace on earth and the major source of planetary woes and misery.

The fundamentalist principles of Hamas and Hezb'allah are different, as opposing Sunnis and Shiites should be, but they are united by their desperate struggle against secularism, against Western civilization, and against the Jewish state, highlighting the difference between the two civilizations. 

According to the historian of Islam Daniel Pipes:

The purpose of Jihad is not so much to spread the Islamic faith as to expand the sphere of influence of sovereign Muslim power. [...] Jihad is thus inherently shamelessly aggressive, and its ultimate goal is to achieve Muslim domination of the entire world.

He also points out that Jihad has always manifested itself in the form of territorial expansion.

Western man tries to measure, evaluate and comprehend what is happening in the Middle East, but his experience, knowledge and customs limit his understanding of the aggression of Muslim terrorists against Israel and his reaction. This limitation of the West was expressed by Bernard Lewis, an expert on Islam:

Modern Western man is incapable, for the most part, of assigning a dominant and central place to religion in his own life, and incapable of imagining that other peoples elsewhere might do so. [...] Modern Western thinking cannot imagine people fighting and dying in such numbers because of mere religious differences; there must be some other - "genuine" - reasons beneath the religious veil. We are willing to accept that religious conflicts occur in rare instances, such as in Ulster, but to admit that religion can be the essence of an entire civilization is a stretch. Even the very appearance of such an idea is regarded by liberals as a gross insult to their "subjects." This is reflected in the current failure, politically, journalistically, and academically, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the subsequent resort to the language of "left" and "right," "progressive" and "conservative," and the rest of the Western terminology, the use of which in explaining Muslim political phenomena is about as relevant as a cricket commentator commenting on a baseball game.... Muslims from different countries, speaking different languages, share the same memories of a common and sacred past, the same understanding of social identity, the same sense of common destiny. It is not the nation or country, as in the West, that forms the historical basis of identity, but the religious and political community, and the imported Western idea of ethnic and territorial nationhood remains, like secularism, alien, strange and incomprehensible."

Perhaps the West's misunderstanding of the meaning of the Jihad around Israel is also due to the fact that the Jewish state is located at the point where the geopolitical fissure of the world, the "line of separation of civilizations" according to the concept of political scientist Samuel Huntington, takes place, i.e. at the point where, in the terminology of historian Arnold Toynbee, the "clash of civilizations" takes place.  The "clash of civilizations" is a huge tectonic shift that is difficult to comprehend and therefore easier to ignore.

Image: Wouter Engler, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED