Cheat Seeking Missiles

ews reports on Israel’s successful action against Nizar Rayyan (center, spelled Rayan in AP reports and Wikipedia), a prominent Hamas leader and Hamas’ liaison with its military wing, give us an insight into the nature of the Palestinian beast and the Israeli action against it.

Most Hamas leaders have gone into hiding since the Israeli offensive began, but not Rayyan, who was seen speaking at his local mosque and adamantly refused to leave his apartment. Says Ynet:

Prior to striking Rayyan’s house the IDF tried to warn his family about the imminent attack and urged them to evacuate the place, but they refused to do so.

Israel has been using leaflets and even phone calls to give nearby civilians warnings of strikes on known military targets illegally hidden amidst the civilian population. Showing evil to Israel’s good, Rayyan willingly allowed his family to die. This is true to Palestinian standards and true to Rayyan, who was a strong advocate of continuing the campaign of suicide attacks against Israel. He had previously sent one of his own sons out as a suicide bomber in a rather inept attack that resulted in the deaths of only two of the hated Jews. (Oh, the shame the Rayyan family must have felt!)

The suicide bombings have done nothing to advance the Palestinian agenda, yet Rayyan advocated them still, just as he continued to believe Allah would see Palestine victorious, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary - failure, defeat, corruption, powerlessness, squalor, sin, disrespect.

And suicide bombs were just the start of Rayyan’s commitment to terrorism and the destruction of Jews. Wikipedia’s write-up seems to have a bias of support bubbling just beneath the surface, but it is worth the read nonetheless:

An influential preacher at what is known in Jabalia as the “Mosque of martyrs”, Rayan mentored suicide bombers. …

When the Israeli military killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004, Rayan came to be considered Hamas’ top clerical authority. Rayan directed and financed the Ashdod Port attack, which killed ten people.

Rayan was one of the architects behind the 2007 Battle of Gaza, in which 400 Palestinian Fatah party members were killed and dozens more Palestinians were tortured and maimed. According to an Hamas spokesperson, it’s possible that the Palestinian National Authority asked Israel to kill Rayan due to his role in the Hamas-Fatah clashes. He added that Rayan was one of the main reasons why many of Mahmoud Abbas’s men “did not sleep well at night.”

Rayan was fundamentally opposed to the state of Israel. He proclaimed, “True Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

Rayan believed that Jews are a “cursed people” and some were transformed into pigs and apes by Allah. He also believed that Jews must pay for murdering prophets of Islam and “closing [their] your ears to the Messenger of Allah.”

Yet - no surprise here - Rayyan was a hero to the Palestinians. And despite all he knew as a senior Hamas leader, he still promoted his gang of ruthless brothers:

Wednesday saw Rayyan speak at a Gaza mosque and call on Muslims everywhere to pray for the Palestinians in the Strip. “We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.”

Well, it turns out that Rayyan handled Israel right into his grave. Despite Rayyan’s arrogance, Hamas certainly needs money; Gaza survives only because of money received from others. Of course they need weapons, including rockets and roadside explosives made in Iran and China. It’s fine politicking for Rayyan to grandstand like this, because none of the Arab states are rushing to physically defend Hamas, which is seen as an Iranian puppet and a potential spawning ground of Islamist action against their own corrupt regimes.

And, it turns out, Rayyan did need their prayers - but prayers have done little to help the Palestinians, and they didn’t help him or his family. Perhaps they are being prayed to the wrong god, a god that endorses cruelty and violence.

We learn from AP that the Israeli strike killed two of his four wives and four of his twelve children, so we see that Rayyan is a polygamist and a hyper-procreator, responsible for his little part of the gross over-population of Gaza and the resulting poverty. Presumably, the four children were his younger offspring, murdered by their father, who refused to allow them to leave for Tehran or other safe havens available to Hamas leaders. [Update: Subsequent reports reveal that all four of Rayyan's wives and about a dozen of his progeny died in the attack - more evidence (as if we need it) of the culture of death that consumes the Palestinians.]

Knowing his actions would lead to these innocents’ deaths was OK with Rayyan since he was a professor of Islamic law - you know, cut off their hands or their heads, stone them, whip them, die for Allah. He knew his personal behavior was right with his personal god, cruel god that the Muslim’s Allah is.

We also learn that the one-ton bomb dropped on his house killed a man who “was respected in Gaza for donning combat fatigues and personally participating in clashes against Israeli forces.” Not a mamby-pamby negotiator for peace, this Rayyan.

Finally, AP tells us that secondary explosions were witness after the initial strike on Rayyan’s building, so we know that he was storing Hamas munitions in a civilian building, putting his own family at risk in violation of international law - and that probably makes him a hero to Palestinians as much as donning combat fatigues.

The death of Nizar Rayyan, his wives and his children is a morality play of the highest order. We see in Rayyan all that is evil: arrogance, hatred, the murder of wives and children, terrorism. We see in Israel a highly moral attempt to protect the innocent while destroying the evil.

And we know that in Gaza, Rayyan will be mourned as a hero. What does that say about Gaza, Hamas, the Palestinians and Islam? And what does it say about the U.N., international media and much of the international community that all stand by Hamas at times like this?

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