My late publisher Lord George Weidenfeld knew about the Nazis. Escaping from Vienna soon after the Anschluss in 1938, he managed to save his immediate family from the Holocaust, although he lost many other relatives to it. He broadcasted to the Third Reich while working for the BBC during the Second World War, and published Albert Speer’s memoirs after it. If anyone could get into the psyche of the Nazis, George could.

It therefore came as a surprise when, over tea in the Carlyle Hotel in New York nearly a decade ago, George said, “There are people who are worse anti-Semites than the Nazis.” He went on to explain why al Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, although of course not as genocidal on the same physical scale as the Nazis, were qualitatively worse than the Nazis in their belief systems, impulses, and instincts.

George died in January 2016 but had he been alive on October 7 this year, he would have had the satisfaction of having his view, once considered controversial, very publicly justified. For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.

[It’s a fascinating essay, one that reveals why Hamas’ genocidal impulse is also its fatal flaw. Hitler lost the war not by the exposure of the Final Solution, the scope of which became clear at the end of the war, but because of his other racial assumptions about the Slavs also being sub-human and inadequate at war. That one mistake led Hitler into his fatal error of attacking the Soviet Union. Hamas, on the other hand, indulged their “lust” for killing Jews before they even had secured its operating area, because they couldn’t control their impulses. They AND their supporters *revel* in their barbarity and Jew-hatred. It is their first priority and practically their entire ideology apart from the other aspects of radical Islam. Read it all for the inevitable conclusion one has to draw from this point. — Ed]