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Istanbul: “Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but rather a group of liberation and mujahideen fighting to protect its lands and citizens.” A remarkable statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, breaking the attempts of Israel and its Western supporters to demonize the “Palestinian resistance,” similar to what most of the global liberation movements have been subjected to. Imperialist powers often branded it “terrorism.”
Accusing any liberation movement of “terrorism” is usually a prelude to committing the most heinous violations against its members and the people to which it belongs.
This includes indiscriminate killing, torture, the use of internationally prohibited weapons, and displacement, and even reaches the stage of “genocide,” as happened to the Native Americans on the American continent.
What is happening in the densely populated Gaza Strip, including the bombing of civilians, the killing of children and women, and the targeting of infrastructure with thousands of tons of highly destructive bombs, was preceded by media mobilization and the preparation of world public opinion to accept massacres beyond the capacity of any normal human being.
This is whether by accusing the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) of terrorism and that it is like ISIS, or describing the Palestinians as “human animals,” who are even lower than animals.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” which the human rights organization Human Rights Watch considered “an invitation to commit war crimes.”
But such crimes were previously committed by French colonialism in Algeria, Italian colonialism in Libya, and American occupation in Vietnam.
Indeed, all European colonialists demonized the liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in particular, and treated their people like slaves and serfs (workers without rights) or even lower than animals, which made it easy for them to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity that are not even permitted by their laws.
The Libyan case
is one of the glaring examples of liberation heroes who were branded by their country’s colonizers with the most horrific qualities, the leader of the Libyan resistance, Omar Al-Mukhtar, who fought the Italian occupation for twenty years (1911-1931).
When Omar Al-Mukhtar was captured and later brought to trial, charges of rebellion, disobedience and treason were brought against him, and he was executed by hanging on September 16, 1931, in front of about 20,000 people (local residents) and detainees who had come to watch the execution of the “never-defeated legend.”
But the “rebel” Omar Al-Mukhtar, after his hanging, turned into a symbol or even a legend of resistance and liberation, not only in the eyes of Libyans but in the eyes of the world and even their former colonizers.
On October 16, 2021, the Consul General of Italy, Carlo Bathori, laid flowers on the shrine of Omar Al-Mukhtar in Benghazi.
He said: “Over the past years, many important leaders in my country have expressed their regret, on behalf of the Italian people, and on behalf of the Italian official institutions, for the great suffering that has been caused to the Libyan people as a result of colonialism. As an official of the Italian state, to which I have the honor of belonging, I also sincerely renew my Today is the expression of this regret.”
Many of the main streets in several international cities, including Gaza, bear the name “Omar Al-Mukhtar,” in memory of him.
The movie “Omar Al-Mukhtar” (Desert Lion/title of the English version), in which the main role was played by the famous American actor “Anthony Quinn,” is a historical epic that people do not tire of watching despite its production in 1981. It conveyed the struggle of the Libyan people through one of its heroes and how they suffered from the killing of civilians. The displacement of Bedouins, the use of chemical weapons and indiscriminate aerial bombardment of villages for the first time in history.
During the first 20 years of the Italian occupation of Libya, a quarter of the population of Cyrenaica, which numbered 250,000 people at the time, were killed, and 100 of them were displaced from the desert to the camps, and many of them died of epidemics and diseases.
This is the scenario that Israel seeks to repeat in Gaza, but in an innovative way, by killing the largest number of Palestinians and displacing them, forcefully or voluntarily, outside the Strip.
The Algerian situation:
Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune compared his description of the Palestinians as “terrorists” to what the French colonialists used to describe the Algerians during the liberation revolution (1954-1962), stressing that “the Palestinians are not terrorists and will not be terrorists… and whoever defends the right, the land, and “His country is not terrorist.”
Tebboune referred to the statement of Larbi Belmahidi, one of the leaders of the revolution, who was attacked by the French after his capture in 1957, because the Algerian revolutionaries used traditional bombs hidden in women’s bags and bags, and detonated them in bars and cafes frequented by settlers. He replied to them, “Give us your planes and we will give you our bags.”
More than half a century after this date, and exactly in 2012, something like a heated debate took place between the Algerian activist Zahra Drif Bitat, who participated in the “bomb bomb” operations, and the French-Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, in the French city of Marseille.
Levy tried to convict Zarif Batat by talking about her just cause using “inhumane” means, and Batat responded that they did not have advanced weapons but fought the colonizer with “possible means.”
Colonel Taher Zubiri, a former Algerian chief of staff, tells the story of former Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika, when one of the former French presidents demanded compensation for the property of the French settlers who had left it in Algeria after its independence. Bouteflika (the former president) demanded compensation for burning 8,000. Algerian village.
The Algerian people’s support for the revolutionaries was “bloody,” as they razed entire villages to the ground, displaced their residents, and placed them in guarded camps, to deprive the revolutionaries of any logistical support.
This explains why Hamas and the Palestinian movements resorted to capturing the largest number of Israelis. Military personnel and even civilians, with the aim of exchanging them with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, whose number exceeds 7 thousand, and achieving a kind of deterrence.
But the price of freedom was huge, as Algeria lost one and a half million martyrs in less than eight years, even though its population after independence was only 6 million people, compared to the killing of 23,652 French soldiers in the same period, according to French army data and historians’ estimates.
The Vietnamese case:
Accusing Hamas of “terrorism” is nothing but a repeated episode of the “colonialism and liberation” confrontations. In the words of the hero of the Dien Bien Phu battle, Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, “Colonialism is a stupid student who only understands by repeating lessons.”
The overwhelming military superiority of the colonialist armies cannot overcome the will of the peoples struggling for liberation, even if they are accused of “terrorism.”
In 1955, the United States intervened in Vietnam and formed a loyal government in the south to confront what it claimed was “communist advances,” while the North Vietnamese sought to unify the country.
The Vietnamese people, and the Vietnamese Liberation Army behind them, fought a liberation guerrilla war, which the West accused of “terrorism,” but in the end they were able to liberate their homeland, and the establishment of the unified Socialist Republic of Vietnam was announced on July 2, 1976, 22 years after the division of the country.
As such, the national liberation movements proved in these experiences that no people lost a war to liberate themselves from colonialism.
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