Egyptians showed how to defeat groups like Hamas

 Haisam Hassanein:

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As the Egyptian government demonstrated in its effort to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that gave rise to Hamas a generation ago, ideas wither without organizations to pursue them.

The Egyptian case has special importance because of the ties between Hamas and the Brotherhood, but there’s no shortage of ideas that lost their appeal because their advocates were defeated.
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The Egyptian president and former general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, has spent his decade in office working to crush the Brotherhood.

His methods are rough and have resulted in sharp condemnation from American progressives.

Yet today the Brotherhood no longer exists in any meaningful form beyond a web page and a few little-known figures claiming to be leaders while living abroad.

Sisi’s thorough decapitation of the group had little to do with winning a war of ideas.

The government arrested Brotherhood leaders and forced some into exile.

It used extensive force against the group’s militant offshoots.
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Perhaps most important, it waged a relentless campaign against the Brotherhood’s domestic recruitment sources by shutting down its educational institutions, intercepting funding from abroad and working through state-controlled media to criminalize Brotherhood ideology.

No question, there are still Egyptians who believe in that ideology.

The group spent decades building and indoctrinating a committed base.

But as Cairo squeezed harder and harder, infighting between the Brotherhood’s leaders in the diaspora caused it to splinter.

Israel is fighting the same enemy.

Hamas is an offshoot of the Brotherhood, which was born in Egypt and inspired dozens of radical branches across the Muslim world.
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The war in Gaza is responsible for great suffering, but Hamas is responsible for the war and for using its people as human shields.

In the long run, a decisive defeat for Hamas is what’s best for Palestinians and the region as a whole, not just Israel.

Hamas has genocidal ambitions not only against Israel but also against all non-Muslims.  It is an organization that sees terror as a means of dominating others.   Egypt has shown that such organizations can and should be defeated.  I think Israel will eventually prevail in this conflict.

See also:

The West is now at war with Iran and its proxies

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As Western forces learnt to their cost during the recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, Iranian-backed militias were highly effective at killing and maiming significant numbers of American and British troops without requiring Tehran to involve itself directly.

Now Tehran is resorting to the same tactics again as it seeks to escalate the Gaza conflict into a wider regional war. It is encouraging groups such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to open new fronts in a bid to intensify the pressure on Israel and the US.

Iran’s official position, of course, is that it has no desire to provoke a direct confrontation with the US and its allies, a policy adopted after two US aircraft carrier battle groups were sent to the region after the October 7 attacks.

Tehran’s reluctance to involve itself openly in the Gaza conflict was clearly evident when the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, met with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in November and told him that Iran was not prepared to enter the war.

What Khamenei did not admit, however, was that Iran would instead encourage its numerous allies in the region to provoke further unrest, an approach that has resulted in the recent upsurge in attacks carried out by the Houthis and Hezbollah.
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We should not pretend that Iran is behind these attacks.  While hitting their proxies may be the current strategy, Iran should be directly threatened if it keeps up the attacks.