Jund Ansar Allah and the intra-Islamist showdown in Gaza

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 by Jonathan Kay

Only in a place like Gaza could Hamas find an evencrazier Islamist group to fight with.

This weekend — in one of those surreal maniac-on-maniac battles in which you wish both sides would annihilate each other — Hamas forces attacked the followers of Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the Partisans of God), an al-Qaeda inspired ultra-ultra-ultra militant group (not to be confused with Hamas, which gets two ultras, and Fatah, which gets only one) led by your usual creepy old bearded Ahmed Yassin/Abu Hamza Al-Masri/Omar Abdel-Rahman type — one Sheikh Abu al-Nour al-Maqdessi. (Check out this photo of him — the guy looks like a Klingon.) Their agenda is the creation of an Islamic emirate in Gaza and the total destruction of Israel (It's a platform they share with Hamas, but they complain Hamas isn't doing it with enough gusto.)

Al-Maqdessi has now gone to his virgins: His house was blown up by Hamas security forces — this being after more than a dozen of al-Maqdessi's followers were gunned down at their mosque in Rafah. (What's that you ask? Doesn't blowing up the man's family home count as "collective punishment"? Oh, and apparently, one of the dead included an 11-year-old girl. So can we expect an investigation from the UN and all the other usual-suspect NGOs who launch 18 different inquiries every time Israel confronts Palestinian terrorists? Ha ha ha.)

This counts as good news ... I guess: After all, a fire-and-brimstone Islamist would-be terrorist leader has been removed from the earth. Then again, it feels weird to be cheering on Hamas in any context. I also note that in the firefight at the mosque, the KIA list included a senior Hamas leader who'd masterminded abductions of Israelis — which counts as good news, too. So one is left with the lingering feeling that — rather than getting wiped out so quickly — the Soldiers of the Partisans of God might have done the world more good by doing some more soldiering and taking out a few more Hamas terrorists.

But putting aside the crazy-versus-crazier surrealism of the whole episode, there's an important geopolitical lesson here. And it's this: For all the Muslims out there who say they want a "pure" Islamic state governed by Shariah law, such a project is impossible — and not just because the Koran is a religious document, not a blueprint for a modern, bureaucratic state. The basic problem faced by folks such as Hamas, the Taliban, and Iran's Mullahs is that their claim to political power is based not on the promise of sound governance, but on their fealty to the abstract idea of God's will — which means they're vulnerable to every two-bit al-Maqdessi-style maniac who claims he's got an even better, purer, less corrupt line on what God reallywants.

But of course, the incumbent Islamists aren't going to be content to settle their differences with such principled grass-roots dissidents by reasoned theological debate — and so they respond the way Stalin did when communists engaged in similarly divisive arguments about the needs of the workers: They slaughter everyone who disagrees with them. Thus the death of al-Maqdessi. Thus the uncounted Iranian protestors tortured to death in Tehran's jails. Thus the murderous intra-Talbanic infighting in Pakistan.

In other words, the political slogan that "Islam is the answer" is not only terrifying, but demonstrably wrong: A government that pledges itself to the implementation of Allah's wishes will always either collapse or, under siege from more-pious-than-thou competitors, decay into just another violent Iranian-style thugocracy.

jkay@nationalpost.com