Israel Has the Right to Defend Itself? 😒

Israel Has the Right to Defend Itself?

We send peace and blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, the Prophets and Messengers that came before him, his family and companions that served alongside him, and those that follow in his blessed path until the Day of Judgment. And we ask Allah to make us amongst them. Allahumma Ameen.

Dear brothers and sisters, there is a famous hadith that is often quoted in the capacity of exploring the many dimensions of hypocrisy. May Allah protect us all from it. Allahumma Ameen.

And as we come up to the anniversary of October 7th, where we expect to see an even greater outpouring of hypocrisy than what we have become accustomed to seeing over the last year, I felt like it was important to explore one particular dimension that the scholars have reflected on with this hadith.

The Hadith of the Signs of a Hypocrite

The hadith is the famous hadith where the Prophet ﷺ said:

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 33; Sahih Muslim, Book 1, Hadith 107)

That the signs of a hypocrite are three: when they speak, they lie; when they make a promise, they break it; and if they are entrusted with something, they violate that trust. And in one narration, a fourth trait is added — when they get into an argument, they transgress the bounds of that argument.

There are many dimensions of this hadith that we have explored from the minbar and in multiple classes. But there is one dimension that some of the scholars speak of, which is particularly relevant to the context that we are in today.

If you read this hadith, every category intercedes or overlaps with the other category, but there is also a progression in this hadith. What does that mean? Every single portion of this hadith involves telling a lie. But some of the scholars mention that the progression of the hadith is the extent to which you are willing to go to sell that lie.

And so إِذَا حَدَّثَ كَذَبَ — obviously you tell a lie and you speak. But beyond that, if you really want to sell that lie, you make a promise. You add the element of your integrity, staking your integrity on the line and saying this is the truth, I promise you this is the truth. And I intend to do this, or reality is as I am reflecting it, I promise you this is the case.

And the third one being وَإِذَا اؤْتُمِنَ خَانَ — that if that person is entrusted with something, they break that trust. They go to the extent of betraying the privacy of people, they go to the extent of revealing that which should not be revealed, they go to the extent of outright betrayal — all in order to cover themselves as they live and speak in that lie.

وَإِذَا خَاصَمَ فَجَرَ — when they argue, they violate the boundaries of argumentation, they inherently transgress in their argumentation. What happens to a liar when a liar gets caught lying? They immediately blow up, they immediately explode, they immediately make a spectacle so that they can cover their own tracks.

This is one dimension of these layers of hypocrisy. May Allah protect us from absorbing it, may Allah protect us from becoming immune to it or from being complacent with it. May Allah protect us from not challenging it in the political and social and religious discourse that is around us. Allahumma Ameen.

The Conversation at Uhud: Abu Sufyan and Umar ibn al-Khattab

I wanted to come to a conversation in the seerah that has become so much more relevant over the past year. And every single element of this conversation, we can spend an entire khutbah with — and in fact we've done entire khutbahs on a sentence or two of this conversation.

It's the conversation between Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) and Abu Sufyan. When Abu Sufyan was an enemy of Allah, standing in the battlefield of Uhud, calling out to the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr and Umar, may Allah be pleased with them. And challenging them with his boastfulness over the perceived victory of the mushrikeen over the muslimeen — over the perceived victory that they had over the Prophet ﷺ and his community.

There are many famous elements of this exchange. Allahumma wala maula lakum — Allah is our protector, you have no protector. Qatlaana fil jannah wa qatlaakum fin naar — our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hellfire. The responses are deeply profound.

But subhanAllah, there is one sentence that often gets buried and that I want us to pay attention to for the sake of this particular khutbah. It's towards the end, where Abu Sufyan says yawmun bi yawmi Badr — a day for a day of Badr. Meaning this day was equivalent to the day of Badr. Walharbu sijal — and he says that war is a continuous affair, meaning there are going to be days of victory and days of defeat, days of joy, days of sadness. That war is an ongoing affair. There are days of celebration and days of grief.

But listen to what he says at the end of this. He says: watajidoona muthla — when you come down from Uhud, you're going to find some of your family and companions mutilated.

Put yourself in the scene if you're standing with the Prophet ﷺ. The dust of war, the dust of the battle is literally still being kicked up. You've seen when a bunch of horses or camels pass through a desert area — imagine the dust, the smell of blood, the freshness of war. And the Prophet ﷺ wounded severely, with his companions wounded severely. And Abu Sufyan calling out to him with the dead behind him, saying: listen, Muhammad ﷺ, when you come down, you're going to find some people mutilated. You're going to find your family and companions mutilated. And as Ibn Hajar explains specifically — the cutting off of the noses and the dissecting of the insides. You're going to find your people cut up.

But what he says next is extremely interesting. He says: lam aamur biha wa lam tasu'ni.

SubhanAllah — sounds just like Matthew Miller. He said: I didn't command it, but at the same time I'm not mad about it. I didn't tell them to do that, but at the same time I'm not upset about it.

And of course Abu Sufyan, even as a disbeliever, is more honorable than these people. But just think about the message that's being sent here. By the way, I'm denying my complicity — plausible deniability. I didn't tell them specifically to go cut people up. Because that's against the manners of the Arabs. Even if we're not Muslims, that's not our way. We're more dignified people. I didn't tell them to do that. But at the same time, I'm not too mad about it.

Denying complicity, but expressing as well the apathy that we are so used to seeing in regards to our dead.

The Tactic: Ignore Context, Deny Complicity

Now subhanAllah, what he's doing here is a tactic. There is psychological warfare that is embedded in this. And I want you to once again put yourself in the context.

The October 7th of Quraysh was the battle of Badr — because to them, history started on the battle of Badr, clearly in the way that this was being represented. Everything before Badr doesn't count. The whole context of why Muslims were driven out of Mecca in the first place, and why Muslims were forming the basis of trying to attack those caravans between Mecca and Al-Sham — to largely recover what was looted from them in the first place — all of the murder that was committed against the Muslims, Sumayyah (may Allah be pleased with her), the family of Yasir, the dragging of Bilal through the streets, what happened in Abyssinia. All of that didn't matter. It was Badr now.

You fought us and you killed our fathers in Badr. History before that doesn't matter. Context doesn't matter. So this is a day for a day. It's natural. We're going to fight you like you fought us.

But it also gets a little trickier — that the Prophet ﷺ treated the prisoners of Badr with the greatest form of dignity. He freed them ﷺ for limited amounts of money. He freed them ﷺ sometimes for just being able to teach some of the Muslims how to read. He made all sorts of concessions for them. His character ﷺ towards the prisoners — and it was not that long ago, it's only a year prior to this — towards the captives, was so exemplary that some of them became Muslim and then came back to their families in Mecca and told the stories of their treatment in captivity, and they became Muslim too.

And this is how you treat our dead? You mutilate them? You cut their noses off? You dissect their inner parts? And so what's the tactic that's being used here? Intentionally ignore context and deny complicity. I didn't tell them to do that. But at the same time — Quraysh has a right to defend itself. Mecca has a right to defend itself against the Muslims. I mean, you guys shouldn't have fought us in Badr, and I'm not too mad about it.

SubhanAllah — you look at the eyes, by the way, of the spokespeople, and you can just see the absolute absence of any type of compassion when they talk about a dead American citizen that's Palestinian or advocating on behalf of the Palestinians. It just shows. I'm not too upset about it. But we'll wait for the Israelis to investigate. Intentionally ignore context and deny complicity.

"Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself"

Why? Because Quraysh has a right to defend itself. Move on to where we are now. The statement that every single politician starts off with: Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel has a right to defend itself. Whether it's a liberal or a conservative politician, it doesn't matter. Israel has a right to defend itself. Because of the horrible atrocities that were committed against it, any nation — any nation — we're not going to tell you anything about what happened before — but any nation would do the same thing that Israel is doing.

And you know what? When talking about the United States and some of these Western nations, they're not too far off the mark in terms of the war crimes and the atrocities. But any nation would do what Israel is doing.

So you listen to Prime Minister Starmer in the UK: "We stand with Israel and we recognize her right to self-defense in the face of this aggression. Because Britain supports Israel's 'reasonable demand' for the security of its people." Switch Israel with Palestine here and let's see if that sentence can pass any one of these anti-Semitism checkers that exist today. Switch it with Palestine. It can't.

Kamala Harris — this is her famous statement. I've said it many times but it bears repeating: "Israel has a right to defend itself, but how it does so matters." Israel has a right to defend herself, but how it does so matters. The problem is that she never actually says what the limit of how it does so is. It's just: how it does so matters. And stop there.

Trump — the more blatant shaitan — says: no limits, let them finish the job. Bomb them, kill them, why are you even trying to restrain them, don't even say the words. The result of both of those things is exactly the same thing. Israel has a right to defend herself. Israel has a right to defend itself. Ignore context, deny complicity, dodge accountability, and ensure Israel's ability to continue its crimes in the Arab and Muslim world.

The Hypocrisy of International Law

And by the way, even legal scholars point out the hypocrisy. Remove Islam from the equation. Remove just the doublespeak and the bare humanity that any politically illiterate human being can see through. Here you have legal scholars that point out it's hypocrisy.

International law is supposed to be the point of reference that nation states point to and demand respect for. But when Israel is the serial violator, the world sits back and watches as the same actors that crafted those laws as a mechanism to control others make sure that Israel can act out of control.

And so you start to go through. You go through the Fourth Geneva Convention. How many articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention does Israel continue to violate? We don't have time to list them all.

Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — killing women, raping women, sexually assaulting women, and publishing inappropriate footage violating their belongings.

Israel violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — forcefully transferring thousands of Palestinians and deporting them out of their homes to occupation prisons.

It violates Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — destroying personal property belonging to Palestinians, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, and occupying those properties for settlers to come and live in their place.

It violates Article 54 of the Fourth Geneva Convention — purposely starving civilians as a method of warfare. And it's established that even prior to this genocide, they would calorie count for the people of Gaza. Article 54 also prohibits attacking, destroying agricultural crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies, and irrigation works for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population. Remember the videos of Israeli soldiers using sheep as target practice? We've gotten so desensitized to them using actual human beings as target practice that we forget that that's even a war crime.

And of course, Israel keeps saying it has the right to self-defense. But according to the Fourth Geneva Convention, you can't defend yourself against the people that you occupy — even by the standards of the same international laws that have been used to beat us upside the head. Israel is the greatest violator and transgressor, but Israel has a right to defend itself.

And the only thing that our politicians do is stand up and say: we're grieved over the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, we're grieved over the death of Aysha Noor, we're grieved over the death of this person and that person and that person. But we'll wait for the investigation to carry itself out. And we believe that Israel has a right to defend itself.

The last thing that you heard about Iran from our president: we don't believe Israel should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, but Israel has a right to defend itself. So even if it does, we're okay with that. We're going to keep making sure that we write the checks and keep it going.

Our Responsibility as Muslims

Why am I saying this now? You're coming up on this anniversary. And I want us to just appreciate that as Muslims, we've allowed ourselves to be on the back foot way too often. Let's learn the lesson.

And so as you get bombarded with the "do you condemn?" questions coming up, say: I condemn you for your silence and complicity every single day before and after October 7th. You have no moral authority to ask me these questions. You have no moral authority to try to put us on our back foot.

Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. Palestinians have a right to self-determination.

As Muslims, we have an imperative ourselves to hold the line of moral consistency in a morally inconsistent world. We have the responsibility to say: we're against the targeting of all innocent civilians. We're against the killing of all children. And we hold that line consistently across the board. It's not us who have the problem. And we have to nurture that in our children as well.

And may Allah be with our brothers and sisters who have faced the worst of this dehumanization.