Rahim Mohamed: Son of Hamas warns of ‘disaster for mankind’ if terrorist group isn’t destroyed
Just as Hamas headbands and flags are becoming the hottest must-have accessories on campus this spring, one man with an intimate view of the rot at the core of the terrorist organization is taking his own message of peace to the brainwashed masses.
Mosab Hassan Yousef, the estranged eldest son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, was in Vancouver on Thursday to speak at a community event organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
Yousef, known alternatively as “son of Hamas” and “The Green Prince,” pulled no punches in sharing his dismal assessment of the militant Islamist movement that runs in his own blood.
“It’s pure evil that we’re witnessing,” Yousef told a packed house of more than 1,000 attendees at Vancouver’s Schara Tzedeck Synagogue. According to the event’s organizers, roughly half of those who came out to hear Yousef speak came from outside of the Jewish community.
“(Hamas) isn’t just a threat against Israel or the Jewish people, it’s a threat against all civilization,” he added. “If we don’t stop them, bury them in the canals that they have dug themselves, it is going to be a disaster for mankind.”
Groomed as a child to follow in his father’s radical footsteps, Yousef started having second thoughts about his affinity with Hamas while serving jail time in Israel as a young adult. Seeing Hamas-affiliated prisoners torture and kill their fellow inmates led him to question the organization’s fitness to lead the Palestinian people.
“This is when I asked myself the question, what if Hamas becomes the governing authority at some point?” Yousef reminisced to Veldhuis. “Will they (continue to) kill our people like this?”
Yousef’s disaffection with Hamas would ultimately lead him into the arms of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. For a period of 10 years in the late 1990s and 2000s, he worked as a double agent, leveraging his pedigree to penetrate the highest levels of Hamas.
The toll this years-long assignment took on Yousef remains evident years later.
“I was supposed to just continue my ‘friendly’ relationship with monsters… who wanted the children to die on a regular basis only to become wealthy. And only for power,” Yousef told Veldhuis, his voice quivering.
Yousef wrote extensively about his defection to Israel and subsequent espionage work in his 2010 autobiography Son of Hamas. His youngest brother Suheib has since joined him in publicly rejecting the movement their father helped found, calling Hamas a “racist terror organization” in a 2019 Israeli television interview. Yousef told me after Thursday’s event that he’s not in touch with his younger brother and unaware of his whereabouts.
Yousef’s appearance came just hours after word of Vancouver-based Samidoun coordinator Charlotte Kates’s arrest was reported in the media. Kates, who publicly praised Hamas during a late-April demonstration in downtown Vancouver, was booked by police in connection to an ongoing hate-crime investigation and later released with an order prohibiting her from attending any protests for the next five months.
His message for Kates and those like her was unequivocal.
“Anyone… here in the west that has given Hamas legitimacy as a resistance movement (and) given them political cover (by) making excuses is complicit in Hamas’s crimes,” Yousef declared to rousing applause.
He had similarly pointed words for the misguided young people holed up in so-called encampments on college and university campuses across North America.
“We’re supposed to teach our students… how to become doctors, lawyers. Create stuff. And now we have a crowd of losers, I don’t know where they came from.”
“They want to build another Gaza in the heart of (campus),” Yousef quipped to a smattering of laughter. “Why are we witnessing masked people on campus?”
Turning more serious, Yousef said the sight of masks on campus brought back unpleasant memories from his childhood of the first intefadeh in late 1987.
“Masked men would come to our school and say, ‘leave, go to the checkpoints, throw stones on Israel.’ And we did not go to school during the first intefadeh for three years… This is why I’m outraged to say I don’t want to see this here in (North America).”
“First they target education,” Yousef warned. “This is the beginning of chaos.”
During a brief one-on-one interview after the event, Yousef told me that his previously expressed views in support of a large-scale Israeli offensive in Rafah haven’t changed.
“Going into Rafah is necessary and it’s the best option Israel has,” Yousef said, insisting that trying to eliminate Hamas leaders currently pinned down in Gaza’s southernmost city “from a distance” would only extend the war.
“We (must) go into Rafah and, first of all, rescue the hostages — they are in Rafah. Second, destroy the smuggling tunnels between Rafah and Egypt… then capture fleeing Hamas forces.”
Yousef believes that, once these three objectives are accomplished in Rafah, the people in Gaza will effectively be “free from Hamas.”
“Eradicating Hamas’s ideology is a different story; it will take lots of time,” he conceded but was nevertheless adamant that this shouldn’t preclude Israel from crushing what’s left of Hamas’s operational capabilities.
One thing Yousef is certain of is that acceding to international calls to cancel or scale-back the Rafah offensive would be a historic blunder.
“It would be like (after) all the atrocities of this war and we still give Hamas the opportunity to repeat what they did (on October 7) again and again.”
“We cannot afford to have Hamas stay in power.”
Source » msn.com
