Study: Majority Of Hamas Backers Adhere Not To Wahhabism But Whataboutism

Hamas owes something to Wahhabism in its ideology, though Whataboutism has proved much more salient in current rhetoric.

Gaza City, October 11 – Researchers have discovered that activists and online figures defending or endorsing the brutality of the terrorist group that governs this coastal territory harbor a primary belief system that, contrary to popular assumption, follows not the precepts of a radical sect of Islam, but the precepts of trying to distract or deflect from the evil that Hamas perpetrates by attempting to call attention to crimes, mostly imagined, perpetrated by Israel or its founders.

Analysts began to pay attention to the extremist ideology of Wahhabism in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. However, the behavior of Hamas, and of the Palestinians and “pro-Palestinians” who support Hamas, dovetails less with the intolerant tenets of that sect, though the overlap remains significant, than with the tenets of Whataboutism, a much more global ideology not restricted to any denomination of Islam.

“What about Israeli genocide?” challenged at least eight thousand Twitter users, employing a unique definition of the term that somehow results in a tenfold increase in the victim population, and only vaguely reflects the principles espoused by Islamic revivalist Muhammad ibn Abd el-Wahhab in the eighteenth century.

“I don’t care about settlers when there’s a siege of Gaza,” declared other activists, likewise introducing new definitions for familiar terms, and again reflecting none of the religious sensibilities of Wahhabism. Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, owes at least something to Wahhabism in its ideology, though Whataboutism has proved much more salient in current rhetoric.

Some advocates for Hamas brutality engaged in other rhetorical tactics such as direct denial or assertions that babies deserved to be beheaded, families deserved kidnapping, and teens at a rave deserved to be raped, mutilated, and murdered. Their audience, however, trended more toward the already-antisemitic and pro-genocide-against Jews demographic. The Whataboutists, by contrast, aim to persuade more Westernized audiences of the righteousness, rather than the dominance ambitions, of the Palestinian Islamist cause, and as such are forced to reckon with the evil that Hamas massacres embody – unless minimized or “contextualized” by mentioning other events that somehow make mass-rape and mass-murder not-thoroughly-evil.

Whataboutism has more ancient roots than Wahhabism, indeed, more than most ideological movements, scholars say. The earliest confirmed adherent of Whataboutism wrote in ancient Rome, where surviving graffiti preserves an exchange between two residents. One etched into a wall, “Gaius Quintinius lusts after the slave girl of Aurelius Antonius,” under which was scratched in retort, “Sixtus’s mother is a lying whore.”

Please support our work through Patreon.
Buy In The Biblical Sense: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B92QYWSL