[The following, by Professor Geoffrey Alderman, is cross-posted from CiF Watch]

CiF Watch aficionados may be aware that I am currently involved in a spat with CiF resulting from Matt Seaton's ultimatum to me, that if I write for CifWatch I shall be barred from writing for CiF, coupled with the sanction of "pre-moderation" that has apparently been imposed on me for allegedly comparing Palestinians to Nazis in a CiF thread dating from 22 January last.

Just for the record, I did no such thing. During the course of an online discussion on the balance to be struck between compassion for one's fellow human beings and the need to destroy an enemy intent on destroying oneself, I indicated that the fact that the Nazis were human beings did not deter the wartime allies from destroying the Nazi state. I might have added that the destruction of the Nazi state undoubtedly involved the killing of innocents - think of the children burnt alive during the RAF's attack on the port of Hamburg in 1943, or the deaths by drowning caused by "Operation Chastise" - the attack on the Ruhr dams (the famous "Dambusters" raid) the same year.[1]

Whether by accident or design, the CiF censors interpreted this analogy as a comparison, and (without giving me the right to defend myself first) summarily sentenced me to be "pre-moderated" - a sort of probationary status. Matt Seaton himself appears to have been unnerved by this, because as soon as the sentence had been imposed he emailed me "to say that our moderators report that they have had to place your posting in 'premod' because of a rather intemperate remark comparing Palestinians to Nazis ... I hope the mods will swiftly be able to restore you to full rights."

Well, Matt, they haven't - yet. But, be that as it may, just suppose, purely for the sake of argument, that I had compared Palestinians to Nazis. Would there have been any possible justification for such a statement? I think there might have been.

In his just-published history of Anti-Semitism in England Anthony Julius rightly points out that the Blood Libel - the absurd and false accusation that Jews murder Christians in order to use their blood for ritual purposes - originated in Christian England. So it did. Gentile hostility to Jews stems from Christian hostility to Judaism. But the Christian view of Jews is grounded in the writings of St Augustine, who preached that Jews should not be killed, but rather should survive in a wretched form to bear eternal witness to their status as Christ-killers. (It was on this point of principle, incidentally, that the Papacy parted company from the Nazis.)

Early Islam, by contrast, preached that Jews (along with Christians) should be put to death. This is because Islam was founded, in part, on an explicit anti-Jewish discourse. You don't have to take my word for this. The discourse is there, for all to read, in the Koran, whose view of the Jews was in turn derived from Mohammed's own quarrels with the Jews of Medina, who declined to accept him as the last of the prophets. Islam permits and preaches violence, specifically (but not only) against Jews. This explains why disaffected Palestinian Moslems living under the Mandate found it so easy, so natural, to ally themselves with Nazism. Again, you don't have to take my word for this. Simply read the history of Haj-Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti [Moslem religious head] of Jerusalem, who asked Hitler (personally) to exterminate the Jews of the Near East after he had exterminated them in Europe, and who infamously helped raise a battalion of the Waffen SS composed of Bosnian Muslims whom he recruited to assist in the round-up of Jews and other undesirables for the gas-chambers of Auschwitz.

These are undeniable truths. It is equally true that the entire text of the founding Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas - (adopted in 1988) is suffused with a visceral hatred of Judaism and of Jews -- not Zionists or Israelis, mark you, but Jews - and that the Hamas leadership, far from denying that this is so, is actually proud to declare ownership of it, and of the homicidal anti-Jewish bigotry that it peddles. Here, for example, is the late Nizzar Rayyan (a Hamas leader killed in an Israeli bombing raid in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead) speaking to an American-Jewish journalist in 2007:

The Hamas Charter accuses the Jews of a conspiracy to enslave the world. It celebrates the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which it actually mentions) and it employs this endorsement in order to justify war against the Jewish people. It is for this reason - and not just because of the occupation by Israel of part of the Dar el-Islam [The Realm of Islam] - that the Charter calls for the extermination of the Jews:

And it is for this reason that the comparison between Hamas ideology and Nazism is valid. To say this is not to deny or in any way belittle the enormity of the Holocaust. Neither does it imply that the chaotic government of Hamas in Gazastan is in way comparable to the deadly efficiency (up to a point) of the Nazi government of Germany. Nor does it permit any reasonable person to argue that all Palestinians are Nazis. Such an argument is manifestly false.

But as far as Palestinians who are members or supporters of Hamas are concerned, the argument is far from false. Hamas is a modern, Islamised recreation of Hitlerite National Socialism. To deny this is to indulge in a most dangerous species of wishful thinking.

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[1] Had Richard Goldstone been around at this time he would, no doubt, have condemned the RAF for disproportionately destroying the German "infrastructure," but thankfully he wasn't.

[2] http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/nizar_rayyan_of_hamas_on_gods.php [accessed 20 February 2010]

[3] This quotation in the Charter is from the 9th Century CE Islamic scholar al-Bukhari, whose collections of Hadith - alleged prophetic sayings - are venerated by the Sunni branch of Islam, to which Hamas adheres. The Charter itself can be read at: http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/www.thejerusalemfund.org/carryover/documents/charter.html [accessed 20 February 2010] The al-Bukhari quotation is in Article 7. The reference to the Protocols is in Article 32.