Islamic State Calls for a Global War on Jews As the Way to Destroy Israel

Al-Naba 413, page 3

The main editorial in the 413th edition of Al-Naba, the newsletter of the Islamic State (IS), published on 19 October, was entitled, “Practical Steps to Fight the Jews”.

Al-Naba begins by saying that as soon as the Jewish “petty state” or “statelet” (duwaylat) was exposed to attack, there was a “rush to provide comprehensive and unlimited support, and this is neither new nor surprising, even if it has been more intense this time”. American leaders are accused of peppering their speeches with “unprecedented threats and incitement against Gaza and everyone in it! These Crusader-Jewish speeches were quickly translated into a massive campaign of barbaric bombing that threw Gaza into an unprecedented spiral of terror, pain, massacres, and body parts.”

“Every time there is renewed confrontation with the Jews in the Palestinian arena”, Al-Naba says, the question arises, especially in areas outside Palestine, of practical ways to fight the Jews and “achieve the ‘divine promise’ of the disappearance [or demise: zawal] of the Jewish petty state”.

The problem, as IS sees it, is that there continues to be a “prevailing illusion that it is possible to achieve this ‘divine promise’ by fighting under the banner of the ‘Iranian Axis’ that is hostile to the divine method!” This is a reference to the fact HAMAS and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) operate under the command structure of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

At least as bad, in IS’s eyes, is the delusion that heavenly promises can be achieved by nationalists who neglect the fundamentals of what makes fighting legitimate—people lost so far in error that they take “pride” in (at least pretending to) “respect and adhere to jahili ‘international laws’!”

The root of the problem, in IS’s telling, is that these groups portray “the battle with, and hostility to, the Jews as confined within Palestine! There is, for them, no connection to the fight with the Jews outside [Palestine].” It has always been IS’s view that Palestine is merely one front in a global jihad.

In legal (or ideological) and practical terms, fighting only the Jews in former Mandate Palestine is hopeless, IS argues, because the Jewish petty state has always relied on “other parties that they exploited to serve them through deception”—first Britain, then America, and finally the (Arab) “governments of apostasy”.

Al-Naba does not, unlike the HAMAS Covenant, quote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion directly, but the contents of that fabricated document clearly infuse IS’s worldview. The speeches of American leaders lamenting Jewish bloodshed, “whether they are [made by] Republicans or Democrats”, show “the extent of Jewish control over American and European decision-making circles”, IS contends. The “Jewish ‘pressure groups’” (or “Jewish lobby”, as some would say) in America and Europe control Western economies and the media, IS continues, and in their tentacular way “tie ropes of deception” around the political systems to ensure Jewish interests are served. These same “ropes of Jewish deception” are used to “strangle” the peoples in Arab countries to prevent them interfering with the Jews’ interests, according to Al-Naba: this is why so many Arab governments want to normalise relations with Israel.

Having set out the legal, historical, and factual situation, IS feels the answer is obvious: Muslims must strike at all the elements that “together form the ‘fortresses, walls, and bonds’ to protect and sustain the Jews’ power and control over Palestine”.

In an echo of the famous speech by IS’s then-spokesman Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani) in September 2014 that signalled the onset of IS’s global terrorism campaign at the height of the “caliphate”, Al-Naba 413 calls on Muslims everywhere to initiate a “hard and fast [terrorism campaign] to target the ‘Jewish presence’ all over the world, irrespective of the form of this presence”. IS says a specific effort should be made to attack “the ‘Jewish neighbourhoods’ in America and Europe, since they constitute the backbone of the Jewish economy and the centres of control over the Western Crusader decision-makers who support the Jewish petty state.” IS adds that this axiomatically means “attacking ‘Jewish and Crusader Embassies’ everywhere”.

“At the same time, it is necessary to target the advanced defensive lines and walls of the Jewish petty state, represented by the apostate Arab armies and governments”, says IS. These States who “encircle and suffocate Palestine” are not named, but the reference is clearly to at least Egypt and Jordan, this despite the Jordanian government’s early and active agitation against Israel since 7 October pogrom. Beyond this, IS calls for attacks on the Israelis’ “rear lines of defence”, namely the “Gulf States that host the American bases”. Only by targeting all of these parties, “the infidels and the apostates, Arabs and non-Arabs”, can the bonds that sustain the Jewish presence in Palestine be severed, allowing Israel to be destroyed down to its roots.

The Naba editorial then moves a final section that implicitly attacks HAMAS and the other Islamists leading the war against Israel for their ideological and thus strategic deficiencies.

IS says that only the program set out above offers a realistic and practical path for Muslims to “fulfil God’s promise of the annihilation of [the Jews’] petty state” and supporting “our Muslim people in Palestine”. Unsurprisingly, Al-Naba adds that this “is the path that the Islamic State took by fighting all these infidel axes, governments, and armies”, a not-so-subtle rejoinder to Al-Qaeda and others who criticised IS for recklessly going to war against the whole world over the last decade. Driving the point home, Al-Naba says that while others have twisted and turned as changes swept over the region, IS “did not deviate from the guidance of God Almighty and His plan for His slaves.”

There is much talk about a “Jewish ground incursion”, Al-Naba notes, and when this will happen and how. But these military considerations are trifling: “The first priority is the preparation of faith”, adhering to the true monotheism of Islam (i.e., IS’s version of jihadi-Salafism), and “purifying the banner” so that the war is waged within a shari’a framework, rather than under the framework of “international law and regulations” that are an American-Jewish creation.

Once the faith has been corrected, Al-Naba says, the Muslims of Palestine should fight with “whatever military equipment is available to them, but we particularly mention [the need for] explosive belts [i.e., suicide bombers], which have been absent from the arena of confrontation with the Jews. These blessed belts are a distinguishing marker between the fighting guaranteed by international laws and the fighting guaranteed by divine law.”

“In conclusion,” the Naba editorial states, “the Jews have ‘walls and bonds’ that they rely on and fight behind to preserve their dilapidated petty state, and there is no way to overthrow the Jewish petty state except by toppling these walls and cutting these bonds, until the Jews reach the point where they find there is no refuge except to hide behind stones and trees. Then the Jews will realize that they have not lived through the ‘Holocaust’ yet!”

The “stones and trees” line is a reference to an apocalyptic Hadith that says Muslims will go to war against the Jews during the End Times: “the Muslims will kill them until the Jews hide behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or tree will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’.”