"If your people were being subjected to what the Palestinians were being subjected to, would you be a member of Hamas or not?"
Last week, Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of aviation, had an explosive 40-minute interview with the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation about the ongoing hostility in Gaza. Millions of peoples from around the world are to have watched the interview on TV and via other platforms.
Below is a short excerpt of the interview as transcribed by our reporter, Emmanuel Agbo. You can watch a full recording of the conversation HERE.
"If the people of my country Nigeria had been subjected to the barbarity that Gaza has been subjected to by any foreign power and occupation force we would have fought an unending war and we would have fought them into the sea because it is human nature to do so. You say Hamas is evil and are terrorists but would you not have joined Hamas if you were subjected to what the people of Gaza have been subjected to? Netanyahu and Israel are knocking on the door of WW3!"- FFK.
The situation in Gaza is a very tragic one. It's a situation that the whole world views with much concern and deep anger. It's not just Gaza; it is the entire Palestine. The whole of Palestine. What is going on there and what the people of that region and the Palestinian people generally have been subjected to is totally and completely unacceptable. It's not just 11 months of genocide; it's well over 75 years of genocide, pillaging, occupation, terror, and evil visited upon them by the Zionist state of Israel.
What has happened in the last 11 months though is that it has been brought to bear before the entire world. People have finally seen what the Zionist state stands for and what they're capable of doing.
As thousands, thousands of Palestinian children are slaughtered, women are butchered, and men are killed by all kinds of state-of-the-art weapons, they are butchered with no response, no vigorous response from the so-called civilized world. This is barbarity of the highest order. It is evil. It is wickedness. I'm glad about one thing, and that is this: the world has finally come alive to the insensitivity and bestiality of this perverse Zionist state which claims to be a nation of Jews but is in fact a nation of plunderers, pillagers, pedophiles, and vicious megalomaniacs led by a man that I consider to be absolutely evil, Bibi Netanyahu, who has no intention whatsoever, I assure you, of stopping the carnage and the genocide. Rather, he wants to perpetuate it. He wants to continue the occupation. He wants to continue to kill people. He wants to have a greater Israel.
He and his minister of national security, his minister for finance, all of them, we know them. The whole world knows these names, notorious names, which I will now compare to men like Adolf Hitler in the past. That is what has happened. But the good news is that because of the resilience of the Palestinian people, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, resilient and strong, they stood proudly against this tyranny over 75 years and over 11 months of barbarity. Because of that resilience and strength, because they have honour and dignity, they refuse to bow. And they have said, no, no way. We shall stand for the Palestinian people and we shall not be suppressed. We shall not be wiped off the face of the earth. And I'm very proud of that. So that is how I feel about it. And I speak for millions, not just in Nigeria, but all over Africa.
There are two ways of looking at this. I can assure you, and I can tell you right now, that if, for example, my people in Nigeria were subjected to the sort of occupation and the sort of tyranny and barbarity that the Palestinians are being subjected to by Israel today, we would have had an unending war. We would have fought them into the sea and to the end. Very few people would have been talking about international resolutions because it's human nature to do that. And that's one way of resolving this issue--through armed conflict. And you say, well, the other side has all the arms and all the weapons. Yes, but God is still alive. God still exists. I'm a Christian and I know that God exists. And there are many Muslims that know that God exists. So they may have all the arms in the world, but it's only a question of time. It's just a question of time.
So there's that aspect of it. People say, oh, you talk about armed struggle. It's just one option, when all other options fail. I believe in a peaceful resolution of the crisis, for example. I believe that there should be a two-state solution. As a lawyer, that's a civilized and right way to go. Let the Palestinian people have their own country, a sovereign state, and let Israel have its own. But the government of Israel, the people of Israel--80% of them--have rejected that. So what's left? The only thing left, in my view, is to have a situation where the country comes together, both Palestine and Israel, as one nation, and it is a free country where Palestinians have equal rights, and where Israel is now pushed aside and the Jews are a minority within that country. And to get that, you have to fight for it.
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Now, I'm not advocating armed struggle. I'm just saying it's an option. And when people say, oh, but Hamas is such an evil organization. Fine, if that is your view. But listen, if your people were being subjected to what the Palestinians were being subjected to, would you be a member of Hamas or not? Would you be a member of Hamas? That's a question that needs to be put to most of our Western brothers. Would you, during the time of the apartheid struggle in South Africa, not have been a member of the ANC? Was ANC not regarded as a terrorist organization at the time? Was Nat Turner, the great slave who fought against slavery in the 18th century in America, and got up and started killing white people because he said black people have the right to exist as human beings, was he not regarded as a terrorist? He fought against tyranny, and he paid the price for it, but he made the point, and he began the struggle.
During the time of slavery in America, again, during the time of John Brown, a great white warrior, got up and said, I will fight slavery. He took his sons and his men, and he went to liberate black slaves. They fought against tyranny. Eventually, they won. The point I'm making is this: it doesn't matter.
