I’d share with you the observations made Qanta A. Ahmed in in op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. She is a physician and a Muslim and has been visiting morgues in Israel to, as she puts it, “bear witness”:
I arrived on Oct. 19 to spend 10 days as a human-rights observer with the permission of the nation’s Foreign Affairs Ministry and help from Israel Defense Forces officer Kobi Valer. As an observant Muslim, I felt a duty to come and bear witness. What I saw will remain with me forever.
Hamas waged its attacks in the nation’s south, but hundreds of its victims have since been moved north. I encountered many of them at the morgues at the Shura military base near Ramle, some 15 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. I toured the Sammy Ofer Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital in Haifa, visiting the neonatal units whose tiny patients had recently been relocated in anticipation of further conflict. I examined bodies and ashes, incinerated teeth and bones. I saw toddlers, teens and adults, young and old, many of them bound, tortured and burned alive.
and
The Oct. 7 genocide was different, more barbaric than anything before it. The attacks were cloaked in the language and metaphors of Islam, yet corrupted with cosmic enmity for the Jewish people, Judaism, global Jewry and the Jewish state. They revealed again that Islamism is a virulent impostor of Islam with intentions anathema to the faith. And there was no doubt of Islamism’s guilt: I saw real-time footage generated by the Hamas commandos’ own GoPro cameras. I heard phone calls exclaiming the Shahadah—the Islamic declaration of faith—as they murdered, executed, burned, pillaged and then broadcast their crimes.
To me this was the key passage:
This wasn’t like the pogroms of the 1880s, a frenzy of killing with rabid emotion. This was a methodically planned genocide. No such circumstances apply to Israel’s operation in Gaza, and so the description must not be the same. The sovereign state of Israel is destroying Hamas because Hamas is threatening Israel, which is working to mitigate civilian losses. The country has a duty to prevent further genocide against its people. Saying so doesn’t detract from the suffering of Palestinians who are captives of Hamas.
Two weeks after the attack, Queen Rania of Jordan suggested that the butchering of children had yet to be “independently verified†as I examined images of their remains in Ramle. The deceit felt as barbaric as the atrocities. There is no context, no nuance, that justifies genocide. Its intention is the same throughout the ages: the destruction of a people.
She concludes by imploring Muslims to “respond with the necessary moral clarity”. I infer from the tone and content of his op-ed that she does not mean standing in solidarity with Palestinians by that.
