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Why "What Happened on October 7th" Failed to Spark a Moral Crisis in the Muslim Conscience
04 Jun 2025

Why "What Happened on October 7th" Failed to Spark a Moral Crisis in the Muslim Conscience

Kenan Camurcu

It was the anniversary of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas's Gaza leader, launching an operation in Israel on October 7th—an act concealed even from the organization's Qatar-based cadres—in response to which Netanyahu initiated the military campaign to erase Gaza from the map. A person speaking on a news channel, introduced as an international politics academic, chose to use the phrase “what happened on October 7th” for the massive destruction, devastation, and massacre carried out by Hamas militants in Israeli villages bordering Gaza. In contrast, it's worth recalling that throughout his discourse, he enthusiastically paraded all the elements of the acceptable, related, and popular antisemitic language constructed against Jews to frame the Israel-Hamas war. Perhaps he feared that the horrifying images recorded by Gazans during the sudden raid on Israel would make Netanyahu's disproportionate, excessive, and destructive violence in Gaza seem comprehensible.

Žižek, in his speech condemning the October 7th attack and referring to the incident as a “pogrom,” or “mass slaughter,” stated his fear that this assault would lead to a global escalation and entrenchment of antisemitism. It is evident that the attack has also fortified antisemitism within Muslim communities. Muslims are so consumed by hatred that they fail to grasp that European antisemitism, which has produced religious/cultural literature to the extent of making people forget that Jesus was Jewish, will also, by this very token, eliminate the Semitic Prophet of Islam. They are so unconsciously enraged that they would applaud, with bursting palms, Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters' declaration that the “Star of David,” also known as “Solomon's Seal,” is “The symbol I hate most.”

A peculiar and fallacious belief prevalent in some Muslim circles, that Jews are cursed by Allah, almost implies that Jews were created by a different deity. This is an article of faith seemingly copied from ancient Greece. For instance, in a clash of gods, their God resents a nation brought into existence by another God. However, let us not forget that this does not remain a mere metaphysical delusion; it fuels the premeditation to transform divine curse into indiscriminate death for all Jews. This is the dark universe of ISIS, which defines the right to kill anyone it deems an enemy.

Remember the example often proudly cited to illustrate Islam's tolerance: When the Prophet stood up for a passing funeral, he was told, “But he is a Jew,” and he replied, “Is he not a human being?” (Muslim 961). Indeed, the Prophet stood up for the funeral of a Jew and remained standing until it was out of sight (Nasa'i 1927).

The author of these lines, who for quite some time has not identified with institutionalized Islam, believes that the core issue must be sought in the historical-ideological lineage of political religiosity, which has apostatized from and abandoned morality—namely, the conservative and sacralized identity.

The media campaign that has highlighted the shame and catastrophe experienced in Gaza appears to be clearly motivated by a dubious purpose to obscure “what happened on October 7th” on the Israeli side, rather than by conscientious impulses. This is evident from countless signs and proofs demonstrating the clear link between antisemitic animosity and the “support for Palestine” demonstrations in Western streets, which have chosen to express themselves through vandalism, hooliganism, and terror.

It is futile to present as evidence of a surging conscience the demonstrations where Europeans, who do not take to the streets for any other destruction, devastation, or massacre, regardless of how tragic, enthusiastically mingle with Muslims under the Palestinian banner. As various research has recorded, antisemitism in Europe has approached Hitler-era levels in the last five years. A study by the AB Temel Haklar Ajansı in 16 European countries confirms that Gaza is merely an excuse. In fact, instances of hatred towards Muslim communities, especially Arabs, are also increasing. But Muslims, camouflaging their actions as a reaction to the Gaza events, are attempting to absolve themselves by collaborating with racists and directing their anger towards Jews. This is, of course, immoral.

While focusing on constructing a backward, fictitious narrative that suggests the Gaza crisis started out of nowhere, those who disregard Israel's October 7th attack must, for the sake of comprehending the “events” deliberately overlooked due to animosity towards Jewish ethnography, reluctantly examine some information, even though quantifying a tragedy is not a commendable act for humanity.

On Saturday, October 7, 2023, while Israel was on holiday, everyone is aware that Hamas's armed wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, launched over 4,000 rockets into various Israeli cities in the early morning, attacked 21 settlements on the Gaza border from the air with paramotors and from the ground, that 3,800 militants participated in the assault, and approximately 6,000 Gazans entered Israel through barriers breached at around 120 points, among other widely known facts. What the Muslim consciousness does not know, and does not wish to know, is that during these indiscriminate and random attacks, 1,200 defenseless civilians were executed, including elderly individuals unable to walk in their homes, children, women, families driving in their cars, young men and women in the streets, and a crowd at a concert venue. It is also not acknowledged that 250 people, including a 10-month-old baby and a 5-year-old child, were taken hostage and abducted to Gaza, and that these are referred to as “captives.” The mainstream media, attempting to circumvent this peculiarity, anonymously refers to the child hostages in phrases like “prisoner exchange.” Shani Louk, killed at the concert venue, her naked body paraded in the back of a pickup truck through Gaza streets to chants of takbir and amidst celebrations by ordinary people, became a symbol of the attack. There were other similar instances, and the treatment of the exposed corpses was largely attempted to be covered up, except for the overt manifestation of unhinged radicalism.

The fighting personnel of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, whose names are associated with the rape and assault of captured women, and mistreatment and torture of men, are composed of Gazans who joined ISIS in the Syrian war and were employed by the organization as trained killers. They received their salaries from Khamenei's office and were trained by Hezbollah. They even brought Yazidi slaves with them when they returned to Gaza. Mariam, an 8-year-old taken captive/slave, was one of them, for instance.

Because Israelis avoided publishing images of the October 7th Hamas attack in the early days, the reaction from the organization and its supporters was that these reports were false. But as videos began to be released over time, Meshaal, a dollar billionaire among Hamas leaders who do not compromise on their five-star life in Qatar with the motto “there is no saving on prestige,” had to concede, “these things happen in war.” Ghazi Hamad also acknowledged “what happened on October 7th” by stating, “the civilian population is part of the region, there are complications on the ground.” Yet, he could comfortably declare that they would attack Israel again with new “Al-Aqsa Floods,” meaning they would again take 10-month-old babies hostage and initiate a war. Similarly, Khalil al-Hayya, from Hamas's comfortable Qatar cadre, could downplay the horrific massacre by Hamas militants on October 7th and the parading of some bodies through Gaza streets with takbirs as insignificant errors.

Sinwar's indifference to what would befall Gazans after launching a Pearl Harbor-like raid on Israel, killing and taking hostage elderly, young, and children indiscriminately, and Meshaal's nonchalant comment on Netanyahu's massacre in Gaza in response, should have been disturbing, but apostatized Muslim communities did not find it so. Meshaal stated, “Freedom is not gained without a price. The Soviets lost 30 million, Vietnam 3.5 million, Algeria 6 million.” When the presenter asked, “How can you expect support when Hamas kills and takes civilians hostage?”, his answer was: “The Qassam Brigades are focused on soldiers. But civilian casualties can occur in wars. We are not responsible for this.”

It is true that, according to a December 2023 survey, 72% of Gazans supported the October 7th attack, but 22% rejected it. Islamist media particularly fails to reflect that not all Gazans are prepared to die for Meshaal. This is because an accepted victimhood exists within the Palestine industry. For example, the elderly Gazan who, moments before Al Jazeera cut his microphone, exclaimed, “Why is the resistance [Hamas] hiding among the people? Let them hide in hell!”, does not fall into the victim category.

The reasoning of Muslim communities is utterly delusional: Even though Hamas un-Islamically and inhumanely killed and took hostage unarmed individuals (perhaps even many opponents of Netanyahu's Likud), including a 10-month-old baby, the ruling “Whoever kills an innocent person, it is as though he has killed all mankind” (Al-Ma'ida 32) applies to Netanyahu. Muslims, however, are exempt from this. Izetbegović's famous saying, hailed as the pride and perfection of Islamic ethics, “The enemy cannot be our teacher. The war is lost not when one dies, but when one resembles the enemy,” is merely a wall ornament for the conservative.

Hamas leaders, reiterating as a strong justification that Israel does not hesitate to strike even if there are a thousand civilians around one Hamas member, do not bother with this contradiction, even though they themselves do the same. They simply declare, “Civilian casualties can occur in wars, and we are not responsible,” thereby absolving themselves. So, why is Israel wrong, but Hamas right?

If we discuss the issue under the heading of how many Gazans Netanyahu has killed, it would be necessary to make a proportional comparison with the number of Israelis Hamas could kill with its available firepower. If Hamas had the same means as Netanyahu, it would undoubtedly reach the same number without hesitation. Therefore, there is no legitimacy for any aspect that would support an Ikhwan-affiliated anti-Jewish stance. If one is to be fair, just, humane, and moral, one must not abandon reason even in the midst of war. Is the threshold that justifies Hamas-ism taking 1200 lives instead of 40,000? Is it a matter of numbers?

This article is immune to the propaganda of the parties, as it is not concerned with the insensitivity of pitting the catastrophe experienced by Gazans against the catastrophe experienced by Israelis. However, we must ask how a culture that delights in describing “Islamic war ethics” in the most poetic praises in all its texts, and loudly claims that the West can never compete with Muslims in this regard, can then view with understanding the unspeakable savagery displayed by Hamas militants on October 7th, targeting whoever came before them—elderly, women, children. It is, of course, futile to expect adherence to morality and principles from those who, due to their economic, political, and social habitat, are subservient to the dominant language, style, clichés, and slogans, rather than to morality itself.

Apostatized Muslim communities; when Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and the Khamenei regime randomly launch hundreds of missiles towards Israel, they do not worry about those missiles killing innocents. But when Netanyahu does the same, they begin to list a catalog of accusations and insults like massacre, genocide, murder, killer, and so on.

There are various motivations in the Palestinian issue. For example, in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are attempting to create war conditions and a state of emergency in the country to prevent even the calming reforms of Pezeshkian, an accredited opposition figure to the established order. This enables political engineering within the country, and demands for freedom and rights can be suppressed with accusations of being “Zionist extensions.” In Turkey, in addition to these, and even prior to them, there are financial justifications, which are the favorite business sector of political religiosity. Governments and their civilian apparatus constantly fuel anger, sealing people's judgment. Those who, unwilling to go to Gaza and participate in the struggle, instead attack women and children in cafes, assuming they are participating in jihad and satisfying their sense of fulfilling a duty, are precisely these “sealed” individuals.

While the heavy atmosphere of the September 12 military coup continued, the Palestine Rally I proposed to be held in İzmit in 1985, when the Istanbul governorate did not grant permission, was the first demonstration of Islamist groups after the coup. Those were the days when the regime had not yet recovered from the trauma of the Jerusalem Rally organized by the MSP on September 6, 1980, which Evren consistently cited among the coup's justifications. Under these circumstances, at the rally where I served as the head of the organizing committee, a veritable “shirt of fire,” I began my speech with “Both our qiblas are under occupation.” It was an absurd, unfounded, strange statement. I confess it didn't take me long to understand this. But as a reward for not giving up on seeking the truth, I was finally liberated, yet there are still millions who persist in this false rote learning and are not curious about the truth. Of course, I feel guilty for contributing to this unconscious euphoria and hope to atone for my fault by striving for the truth to be understood.

Once you take a side in the fan stands, the effort to understand ceases, and everything thereafter is propaganda. Knowing that the first incident was the antisemitic massacre carried out by the non-Arab, but Arabized (mu'arrab) population of Palestine against local and immigrant Jews in Hebron (al-Khalil) in 1929, and that over time, the matter escalated to al-Husayni forming a Nazi brigade, might help grasp the essence of the issue.

There's something even more unsettling in theory: The Prophet, taking preventive measures against an attack and invasion move from Damascus towards Medina and reaching the Byzantine border, never planned to conquer and seize Jerusalem (and Solomon's Temple), nor did he say, “Jerusalem belongs to Islam.” The Prophet declared Bayt al-Maqdis a sacred place, aligned with the Sacred Mosque (Masjid al-Haram), while Jerusalem was under Byzantine political rule and Jewish religious administration. At that time, he was signing the agreement (the Medina Charter) making Medina a shared homeland with the Jews. This is because hegemonic and conquest-driven ambitions are fundamentally contrary to the principles he laid down. The conquest-driven contemporary Islam is also an Islamized version of far-right extremism. It was the second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, who ethnically cleansed all the Jews from Medina and conquered Jerusalem. Moreover, he cemented his dominance by building a mosque directly on the ruins of Solomon's Temple, the qibla of the Jews, as if there was no other place.

There is not the slightest implication in the Quran or in authentic sayings attributed to the Prophet that Jerusalem belongs to Islam. The fact that Muslims seized it at one point in history is not considered a legitimate reason for possessing Jerusalem. Under the leadership of Amin al-Husayni, Muslims should have united with their Jewish cousins, who had returned from a two-thousand-year exile, against the British occupation and revived the Prophet's legacy of the Medina Charter, rather than enlisting with Hitler to prevent Jews from settling the land. Did collaborating with Fascism, instead of following the Prophet's Medina model, leave behind a legacy to be proud of? The slogan “...if Jerusalem falls, it all falls,” reiterated during political campaigns, is proof that the Ikhwanist mentality, which has abandoned principled adherence and enlisted in fascism, still persists.

This is no time for political correctness. In Gaza, Hamas, which seized control of the government by coup in 2007 and implemented Israel's plan to separate Gaza from the West Bank, always branded opponents as “traitors” under its autocratic regime, executing and dragging them through the streets for public display. How can Hamas, the most tyrannical branch of Ikhwanism, which has prevented Gazans from expressing their will for 17 years and granted no right to existence to any opposing party, organization, or voice, promise a future for Palestine? Leaving aside billions of dollars in donations, Khamenei alone paid Hamas $350 million annually, yet the quality of life in Gaza, under Hamas's dominance with 2 million inhabitants, has not risen above misery for 17 years. This reality, however, does not interest the donors or Khamenei. For Khamenei, it is sufficient that Hamas and Islamic Jihad fulfill the need for legions right under Israel's nose.

If Palestine is discussed without expressing an opinion on Hamas, which has controlled Gaza by force for 17 years without holding elections and makes Gazans—those who cannot hide in tunnels or live luxurious lives in Qatar—pay the price for its actions, then there is an intent to cover up.

As the Palestine industry continues, no irregular instance will create a moral crisis in the Muslim conscience. It would be misleading to consider institutionalized and existing Islam—fermented in Mu'awiya's court—as exceptional and accidental. This discredited form of Islam has not a single word left to say to humanity.

Translated by Gemini

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