Executive summary: Islamic Warfare’s October 7th Moment
- Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre manifested Islamic themes—particularly the categorization of territory into the House of Islam and the House of War, and the imperative of reconquering formerly Muslim-controlled territory—that are still poorly understood by the Western world and even by many Israelis.
- Hamas exemplified these themes in their invasion-massacre in southern Israel. They saw all the people either as Jews or as individuals supporting the Jewish people. This was an international jihad that also claimed the lives of 475 foreigners from at least 25 different countries in addition to Israel who were slaughtered or kidnapped on October 7. Notably, Hamas’s Islamic warriors also murdered fellow Muslims that day whom they considered traders to Islam.
- Today’s Islamic civilization is still rooted in pre-Islamic Arabian culture, which incorporates principles such as solidarity (the ummah) against perceived enemies, the deliberate use of deception as a tactic, and the use of raids—in modern parlance, terrorism—to defeat and demoralize the non-Muslim other.
- In the contemporary world, the ummah seeks to eventually subjugate and Islamize non-Muslim societies through any means possible, among which are mass immigration, information warfare, and the spreading of Islam in the educational and cultural spheres.
- Western governments and officials who relentlessly seek permanent peaceful solutions with Muslim-majority countries, and Muslim organizations in the non-Muslim world, do so at their peril. Westerners continue to ignore the fact that the values and objectives of Islam differ from those of the West. Muslims understand the Western concept of compromise as a form of defeat.
- To resist the Islamic tide, the West needs to reaffirm its own religious roots and values and regain its pride in its achievements and the justice of its path.
