This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia.

Once again, terror has struck Australia’s Jewish community. In the aftermath, a familiar argument has surfaced in the media: that only a handful of individuals, three people out of hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, carried out this act of extreme violence, and that the wider Muslim community has nothing to do with it. This assertion is repeatedly offered as a moral and religious defense and, on the surface, appears valid.

However, what is conveniently overlooked is that celebrations and open approval of this massacre are visible across sections of the Muslim world, particularly on social media and in private conversations. Alongside this, there has also been what can only be described as cosmetic condemnation and performative solidarity, expressed through slogans such as “Islam is against violence” and “Islam condemns this.”

In this process, the victims cease to be those who lost their lives. Instead, Islam, the religion itself is positioned as the primary victim, and the public energy shifts toward defending the religion rather than mourning the dead.

This raises a more uncomfortable but necessary question. Why does this phenomenon recur? Why does violence against Jewish civilians provoke not only silence but, in some quarters, open approval? Unless this question is confronted honestly, beyond politically correct language and defensive posturing, the cycle of denial, hypocrisy, and repetition will continue, costing more lives and deepening hatred across communities.

In the aftermath of this horrific attack on civilians, another familiar narrative has been foregrounded. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the fact that a Muslim saved people during the attack and that another Muslim stood up against the Islamist terrorists. The issue, however, is not whether a Muslim acted humanely in the face of inhuman violence. That is an expectation of any human being.

The more fundamental question is why the first individual was driven to carry out the attack in the first place. Until this question is addressed honestly, there is little meaning in celebrating the second act of resistance against jihadist violence. Acts of courage during terror attacks deserve recognition, but they cannot substitute for a serious examination of the ideological and religious conditioning that produces such violence. Without confronting these roots, such narratives risk becoming distractions rather than pathways to solutions.

Each time such an attack occurs, a familiar defence is invoked: that this is not true Islam, that this is not the Islam followed by the vast majority of Muslims. While this may be factually correct, it leaves a deeper and more unsettling question unanswered.

Why are these acts of terror repeatedly carried out in the name of Islam? This is a question that Muslims themselves must confront honestly and internally, rather than deflecting scrutiny by labelling all inquiry as Islamophobia. Genuine introspection is not an attack on faith. It is a necessary condition for preventing its distortion into an instrument of violence.

Until this question is faced squarely, moral disclaimers will continue to ring hollow and fail to address the root of the problem.

Arfa Khanum Sherwani, described the Bondi Beach attack as Islamist terrorist violence targeting a peaceful gathering. In response, she was subjected to sharp criticism from sections of the Muslim intelligentsia. She was accused of liberal hypocrisy, of playing into the hands of the West, and of immaturity, among other charges.

This reaction is revealing. It shows how even naming and condemning violence carried out in the name of Islam provokes hostility rather than introspection. The focus shifts away from the crime itself and toward discrediting the individual who dares to call it out.

If thirteen or fifteen people are killed in the name of any ideology, that ideology must be subjected to scrutiny. The problem lies not with those who identify and condemn ideological violence, but with the refusal to examine the ideas that legitimize it. The instinct to silence criticism rather than engage with it reflects a deeper discomfort with accountability.

Many argue that such attacks are a consequence of the war in Gaza and Israel’s military actions. However, this particular attack targeted Jews in Australia, was carried out by a man of Pakistani origin, and occurred on Australian soil. It had no direct connection to the conflict in Gaza.

Until recently, some of our left-liberal circles argued that the attack of 7 October was justified, claiming it was inevitable because seventy-five years of history lay behind it. Even if one were to accept the relevance of historical context, a basic question remains unanswered. What had Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia done to people living far away in Pakistan to provoke such violence?

Yet the attack exposes something more troubling. The Gaza conflict is increasingly being conflated and weaponised to justify hostility toward Jewish communities across the world. Political anger over a distant war is redirected into hatred against civilians who have no role in that conflict.

This is deeply concerning. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” can easily be stripped of political context and transformed into rhetoric that legitimises indiscriminate violence. What begins as a political position risks mutating into a justification for collective punishment and terror.

This slippage between protest and violence must be recognized and confronted before it becomes normalized, and the texts that give moral justification to Muslims to carry out such attacks such as Sahih Bukhari’s Hadees in which Prophet Mohammed reported to have said that ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

What it does require is a responsible, contextual explanation of such texts—how they emerged in specific historical circumstances, how classical scholars understood their limits, and why they cannot be mechanically or morally applied to contemporary civilian life.

Islamic history itself offers clear counterpoints to extremist readings. Jewish–Muslim collaboration was not an anomaly but a lived reality: the Jewish physician who served Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi, or the Jewish neighbour of the great scholar Abdullah bin Mubarak, are reminders that coexistence, trust, and shared civic life were integral to Muslim societies. These realities stand in direct contradiction to modern attempts to universalise selective texts into timeless mandates of violence.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.

The most powerful sections of Son of Hamas describe Yousef’s encounters with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to kill….

Since the announcement of the ceasefire in Palestine, my thoughts have instinctively turned toward Son of Hamas by Mosab Hassan Yousef. I’d been meaning to read it ever since a friend recommended it to me in late August. I finally sat down to read it four days ago — and it’s one of those rare books that leaves you troubled and thinking long after you’ve put it down.

In Son of Hamas, Mosab Hassan Yousef narrates one of the most morally fraught journeys of our time—the story of the son of a founding leader of Hamas who becomes an informant for Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet. The book is a profound and an insider’s reflection on one of the most complex human conflicts in modern history.

What stands out in Yousef’s account is not merely his personal reflections, but the human complexity he brings to the political tragedy of Palestine as the protagonist of his memoirs. He writes neither as a Palestinian nor as a sympathizer of Israel, but as a man shaped by ceaseless violence—prisons, bombings, raids, and death.

His politicization, unlike what is often imagined in Western commentary, does not stem from religious indoctrination but from lived experience: from watching his father, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, repeatedly arrested, imprisoned, and brutalized by Israeli forces. Politics, as Yousef’s story reminds us, does not grow out of ideology alone and primarily ; it takes root in suffering and in the injustices people endure in their daily lives.

Portrayal of his father might be deeply unsettling for Israeli readers. Far from the caricature of a fanatic and bloodthirsty cleric that dominates Israeli and Western discourse, Sheikh Hassan appears as a compassionate, devout, and humane man—a moral role model for a community often portrayed as barbaric and violent.

The dissonance between this portrayal and the over-demonized image of Hamas in mainstream narratives exposes the intellectual dishonesty that drives much of Western discourse. Israel, as experts point out, has inflated the image of Hamas to justify its militarization and continued occupation. The refusal to see humanity in the adversary is the first act of moral failure that sustains the cycle of violence.

Hamas’s ideology presents a profound obstacle to negotiated peace: its charter and public rhetoric leave little conceptual space for a permanent political settlement that recognises a Jewish national presence in historic Palestine.

That is not merely a tactical or strategic problem; it is a moral problem with no easy answers. If a movement’s stated aim is the elimination or delegitimization of ownership of land of a whole people, then conventional diplomatic tools — ceasefires, confidence-building measures, or even a two-state framework negotiated at elite levels — cannot by themselves resolve the underlying moral impasse.

Any political solution that ignores or paper-over these existential claims will be unstable at best and fraudulent at worst, because it fails to subject foundational ideas to the scrutiny they urgently require.

When Hamas consistently takes refuge in the Hadees of Prophet Mohammed in Sahih Muslim: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”.

Is any viable, durable political solution possible without directly confronting the religious texts and beliefs that many cite as justification for violence? If a scripture — widely read and accepted by a large community — is interpreted to endorse the destruction of another people, can we realistically expect those who are referenced to be killed to simply sit back and await their own predicted annihilation? This isn’t a fringe citation; it is drawn from material many Sunni Muslims regard as authoritative and prophetic.

If political strategy proceeds while ignoring such claims, can we honestly expect peaceful coexistence —Public debate must therefore address not only borders and security arrangements, but also the ideational premises that have been used to justify the killing and dispossession and continues to do so of so many innocent people.

The book offers no comfort to either side. Yousef’s critique of Hamas is scathing; he does not romanticize its militancy and calls it for what it is. Yet he insists that such movements do not arise in a vacuum. They emerge from genuine political grievances, collective despair, and the absence of any viable political solution.

To dismiss every act of violence as “terrorism,” without engaging meaningfully with the structural causes that produce it, is to perpetuate a conflict that has already consumed generations.

At one point, Yousef recalls how his friend Saleh was killed by the Shin Bet and the IDF, and how his Israeli handler, Loai, broke down, lamenting: “He really believed he was doing something good for his people.” That admission—from within the Israeli intelligence establishment—captures the absurdity of the conflict. When both sides believe they are doing good, ridiculous and genocidal slogans begin to masquerade as viable solutions, solution is the most difficult thing to come to.

Yousef’s reflections on the futility of the so-called “peace process” are particularly poignant. The Oslo Accords, and the idea of peace imposed from above, were always bound to fail because the masses on both sides had not reconciled to peace itself. When mainstream political space is suffocated, it inevitably gives rise to the fringes. 

The most powerful sections of Son of Hamas describe Yousef’s encounters with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians who refuse to kill—not out of weakness, but out of conviction that every human life is sacred. He tells the story of a Jewish man who converted to Christianity and refused to serve in the Israeli army, enduring imprisonment for his belief that killing an unarmed human being violates the essence of his faith.

Yousef recognizes in this man a mirror of himself: someone who seeks to end violence, not perpetuate it. If such individuals multiplied on both sides, peace could one day become a reality.

Yousef’s honesty is also his tragedy. He is deeply naïve at times, believing that moral clarity can transcend the politics of power. His condemnation of suicide bombings, while morally correct, risks ignoring their political context. The bombers of the al-Qassam Brigades and other factions, however horrifying their acts, acted out of conviction that they were striking back against decades of occupation and humiliation. To understand such acts is not to condone them, but to recognize that they are not born of madness, but of genuine grievances that remain unaddressed to this idea and Israel has only worsened this crisis .

The Israeli and Western refusal to engage with that reality—the insistence on treating all Palestinian violence as irrational evil—has only deepened the wounds.

Israel’s strategy of assassination, collective punishment, and mass incarceration has not destroyed Hamas; it has made it stronger. The assassinations of leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Deif have not ended the movement, because Hamas is not reducible to its leaders. It is an organization rooted in the lived experience of occupation and the genuine concerns of the Palestinian people.

As Yousef notes, to think Hamas can be eliminated militarily is a dangerous delusion.

Son of Hamas ultimately reveals that both Israel and Hamas are trapped in a moral stalemate. Israel’s power is absolute, but its legitimacy is eroding. Hamas’s resistance is enduring, but its methods remain morally corrosive. Between these poles, the ordinary people—the ones who refuse to kill, betray, or dehumanize—remain invisible.

Yousef’s story, then, is not one of a Spy, as both Israelis and Palestinians have claimed. It is a story of impossible choices and moral courage, of a man who tried to humanize both sides and found himself alienated from each.

In the end,  Son of Hamas forces us to confront a painful truth: no ideology, whether Zionism or Islamism, can contain the full humanity of those caught in its machinery. The challenge is not to destroy the other, but to recover the human within ourselves and try to work out a solution that could restore our humanity.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not reflect Milli Chronicle’s point-of-view.