My latest: the Son of Hamas

A very very brave guy.

The Son of Hamas.

It's not a name that most would accept willingly, but Mosab Hassan Yousef does. Because that is what he literally is: the first son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the man who helped to create Hamas 27 years ago.

Mosab Hassan Yousef was the eldest son, and therefore always expected to enthusiastically embrace Hamas and its sadism. And he did. In 1997, the year his father helped to create Hamas, Yousef was arrested for throwing rocks at Israelis. He was just ten years old.

In an exclusive interview with this newspaper, Mosab Hassan Yousef now says this of Hamas, his voice thick with disgust: “Their violent strategy - their so-called resistance - is to become legitimized, and get global recognition as a resistance movement. This is what Hamas wants to do. And they are willing to sacrifice thousands of children for political and financial gain.”

But when he was younger, Mosab Hassan Yousef didn’t believe that. Back then, he was the literal embodiment of Hamas. From the start, he was groomed to one day lead the organization, which by 1988 had devolved into a full-fledged death cult. In that year, the terror group published its first Charter, wherein it declared unrelenting war on Jews and infidels.

Says the Charter: "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims kill the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees." Which, of course, is exactly what happened on October 7, 2023, when Hamas killed 1,200 Jews for the sin of being Jewish.

As a young man, Mosab Hassan Yousef enthusiastically embraced Hamas' catechism of hate, and he was imprisoned because of it. But it was in those Israeli prisons that he started to turn against the murderous ideology of his father.

He witnessed men being tortured and killed for being for being collaborators. Few, if any, were. Their innocence did not matter to Hamas, which regards all human life - Jew or Muslim - as subordinate to the establishment of a global Islamist caliphate. One built in house of blood, atop the corpses of Jews and non-believers.

“It’s a death culture,” he says, shaking his head. “They have deliberately weaponized civilians. Basically, now, there is a choice: what do you want? Do you want to live in peace and build a society, or do you want to go on with this nonsense, fighting for eternity, trying to annihilate one of the most-ancient nations on Earth?”

So, Mosab Hassan Yousef made a choice. In 1996, he agreed to become an informant for Israel’s Shin Bet. He told the Israeli intelligence agency that he would help them if they jailed terrorists, and did not simply kill them. Shin Bet agreed. Befitting his lineage, he was given the code name “the Green Prince,” and would ultimately be credited with saving the lives of hundreds of civilians, Israeli and Palestinian.

Not long after he started to inform on Hamas, a missionary gave Yousef a Bible. A year later, he quietly became a Christian. He now lives somewhere in the United States, accepted as a refugee. He can never return to the place of his birth, where his father has renounced him, and where many have pledged to kill him.

Monday night, Yousef spoke before a stand-room-only crowd of hundreds at the Beth Sholom Synagogue in Toronto, a guest of the Jewish National Fund. The location was kept a secret to avoid the sorts of threats Yousef faced in Montreal, where his appearance at McGill was shut down by extremists. In Toronto, there were no protests.

There was security, however. Lots of it. There was more security for Yousef, in fact, than there was for Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper, who were together on Monday evening at a Wellington Advocacy party at the Royal York Hotel, on the other side of town.

As he spoke to the assembled crowd at Beth Sholom, a small army of security looking on, Yousef was repeatedly interrupted by cheers and applause. He was particularly critical of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “The government of Canada has turned a blind eye [to Hamas],” he says, and receives an ovation.

That is a very bad thing, Yousef says, because the threat is real and growing. Says he: “Hamas should not be in power. They should not decide the destiny and future of humanity. But that is what they want.”

Mosab Hassan Yousef, an extraordinarily brave man, knows whereof he speaks. He knows Hamas, he has been the son of Hamas, and he knows what must be done before it is too late.

“If we do not go after them,” he says, “they are going to come after all of us.”