It is a great pity that so few people read history and cultivate a knowledge of the past. The past provides many rich opportunities to compare human behavior to the present, and when such a comparison is made, the parallels are always there. Humans change, but slowly, and along repeated paths.
The path taken by Hamas, the Islamic political terror group that raided into Israel on October 7, 2023, and murdered 1200 Israelis and took 260 more hostage, can easily be compared to the non-Islamic political terror group known as the Comanche Indians. They raided and killed thousands of people in Texas and along the Great Plains, took many more hostage, and mutilated thousands of others over a 100-year reign of terror.
The Comanche were unlike other native American populations in critical ways. First, they were entirely nomadic, and practiced no agriculture. They had come down out of the Rocky Mountains sometimes in the 16th century, and were transformed, like other tribes, by the arrival of the horse. Once they were mounted, they became even more warlike, and as a fighting force, were effective enough to keep the Spanish Empire from pushing north, out of Mexico, and into what is now Texas. It was the Comanche problem that inspired the Mexicans to allow Anglos into Texas, a decision that led to the Republic of Texas, and later the state of Texas. Texas sits right on the grounds roamed by the Comanche, and so there was a clash built into the presence of Anglos in Texas from the very beginning.
The path that led to Hamas ruling in the tiny enclave of Gaza was different than that of the Comanche. Decades of abuse at the hands of other Arab and Islamic powers have led to the degradation of the population, which in turn, has reduced them to the state of primitive peoples, like the Comanche. This degradation explains why the Hamas attack, and so many depredations by the Comanche on the 19th century, have much in common.
So, what do Hamas and the Comanche have in common?
To begin with, Hamas and the Comanche both took hostages, otherwise known as kidnapping, as a normal part of their practice. The Comanches killed most of the people they encountered, just like Hamas on October 7, but they also took a great many women and children captive. They would kill babies, and they were not interested in adult men, but children who were weened and able to adopt their lifestyle, they kept. Women of childbearing years, they kept, after they gang raped them in full view of the other captives and tribe.
Gang rapes were a certainty for women captured on the frontier, and a central feature of the Hamas attacks. The practice is a primitive urge to conquer by degrading the captured women and showing dominance. An individual rape may be about power, but it’s also clearly a sexual urge. A gang rape of captives, done by men who might otherwise be private about their sex lives, is a tool of war. Hamas raped Israeli women in broad daylight on the flat ground for all the other men to see. The Comanche raped captive women around a fire so that the other captives could see. In the Comanche camps, these women would be broken and then remade as Comanche. Hamas rapes to ‘dirty’ or degrade, as some of their own terrorist have reported.
Both Hamas and the Comanche militated the bodies of their targets. The primary weapon of the Commanche was the 14-foot-long lance, and the bow and arrow with tips made of metal. Death vis these methods produced a certain amount to bodily destruction by default, but the Comanche went a great deal further. Nearly everyone was scalped, dead or alive. Scalping meant cutting off the top layer of the head, from the hairline to the back of the skull. Many people survived this process for a short time, but they spent the next few days in brutal unremitting agony before succumbing to blood loss, and infection. The Comanche, if they had time, routinely disemboweled people, and cut off their genitals. They arranged the dead to inflict the most horror on those that would find them. The method of death for anyone captured was gruesome, and most often involved slow roasting over a fire. Others were staked to giant ant beds. The list goes on and on, but the results were the same; slow death, mutilated and degraded bodies, left in the open, for others to find. Maximizing the horror was the point.
Hamas also mutilated bodies beyond what their bullets did. They cut the breast off women and used nails on their private parts. They had less time on October 7 than the Comanche would have had on the frontier, but with the time they had, they inflicted as much sadistic torture on the dead and dying as they could.
The Comanche held captives, and a few were integrated into the tribe, but all the captives were for sale if the right offer came along. The natives figured out early that the white settlers and the US Army would alter behavior if there were captives at stake, and there were intermediaries that would buy the captives with goods, like horses and guns, and those intermediates would, in turn, sell the captives back to their families for cash. Our primary historical records of Comanche life and the treatment of captives comes from those that were returned to their families.
Hamas took at least 260 captives in their October 7 attack, including an infant less than a year old. They took women and men, soldiers and civilians, old and young, whole families, and individuals, and they took back both the dead and living. In one instance, they took back just the head of a man they had murdered, and then sought to ransom it to his father. Like the Comanche, Hamas tries to use the captives as a tool to control the opposing army.
The Commanche were guerilla fighters who never massed for a giant set piece battle. The natives in general could never coordinate with each other to form a competing military. They attacked when the element of surprise was available, and they didn’t attack military garrisons. They attacked homesteads, often after they had stolen the available horses. After an attack, they fled into their grassy domain secure in the knowledge that pursuers would not pursue far, and anyone who did would be attacked if they were deep into the Comancheria and therefore, vulnerable.
Hamas also has attacked in small hit and run events, but they run back to their own custom-made safe harbor underground. They created hundreds of miles of tunnels under Gaza for the purpose of hiding after attacks. They have used the hit and run tactics against the Israelis and hidden hostages in their secret domains.
The Comanches traveled in bands that were loosely affianced but independent. They were Comanches, but they were Penateka Comanches or Nokoni Comanches. They deferred to each other, and they came to camp together towards the end of their reign, but they could not live or work as one big unit.
Hamas has a more unified leadership, but there are more jihadi groups in the Palestinian cause with similar goals. Hamas had stated that some of the hostages that were taken on October 7 are with another group operating within the 25-mile-long Gaza corridor. This group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is different from Hamas, but use the same tactics and has the same goals. They are the same, but different, and not to be confused with Hezbollah, ISIS, al Qaeda, Boca Haran, or hundreds of other groups with the same perverted values and goals.
Back in the Eastern US in the late 19th Century, there were many who were sympathetic to the natives and even the Comanche. They responded to the stories about Comanche land being stolen, and they were not moved by Comanche depredations, rapes, murders, kidnapping, ransoms, or sadistic cruel murders. There were plenty of people who viewed the natives with sympathy and slandered those who would hunt them down and kill them. The frontier people who saw up close what the Commanche did and knew what they were capable of had no such romantic notions of noble savages. They only knew of Comanche savagery because they knew people who had been on the receiving end of it.
Hamas, and the larger Palestinian cause, has many similar apologists across the West and all over the Middle East. Nothing Hamas does will ever be so beyond the pale that the organization is considered beyond redemption. The larger causes are what has captured Western liberal affections, and murder, rape, and torture isn’t enough to drive any course correction. The Israelis, of course, see the torture and death up close. It is their lives that are on the line. The Rangers in Texas and the IDF are fighting from the same mindset, knowing there are many who want them to fail because they see the killers as the good guys.
There are key differences between the Comanche and Hamas as well.
The North American natives in general and the Comanches in particular did not, and never did, want to make peace, live on reservations, or otherwise adopt to the culture that was washing over them. They said so explicitly on many occasions. The Commanche were a primitive hunter gatherer people isolated from the rest of humanity and had no way to even know about other civilizations until the Spanish and then the Texans showed up at their door. Mostly, they wanted to be left alone, or at least that’s what they said. But they also had an irresistible urge to steal from those that were close enough to reach. They raided deep into Mexico, far from what could have been considered ‘their land’.
Hamas and the rest of the jihadi corps, are born of a civilization that has had hundreds of years to grow, develop, moderate, codify and advance along civilizational lines. Hamas doesn’t want to be left alone. They controlled Gaza completely and had a ‘ceasefire’ on October 7 of 2023. Hamas is forward leaning. The Palestinians clearly don’t want to be left alone and Hamas is not seeking to be left in peace. They have been left in peace many times. They want to establish a fixed frontier in Israel. They want to conquer.
And while the Comanche were never anyone’s puppet, Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian cause is a proxy for all the hatreds of the Muslin world against the advanced West. Jews are localized, Western, light skinned, and the precursors to Islam, they are powerful, and they have defied what Islam tells itself. The Commanche had no such complexity.
Another difference is that Hamas has a cosmology. They can be placed firmly in the Islamic system. The Comanche were unique in having no creation myth. They believed in spirits, and looked for signs from these spirits, but they had nothing approaching Islam as an organizing principal. Their war yell was a raw primitive one, and not the ubiquitous ‘Allu al Akbar’ of the jihadi set.
A further differentiator is between these belligerents is the idea of face covering. The Comanche had no media, no art, and no way beyond face-to-face communication to address anyone. Hamas has succumbed to the criminal temptation to cover the face with leave only little slits for the eyes. They are more like the Ku Klux Klan than the Comanche in this regard. Using face coverings has become the fashion now in many sectors, and the covid mask has exacerbated the phenomenon. The Palestinian protestors now include a covid mask as a regular part of their presentation, and the lingering covid mask is now a clear political statement far removed from the utility of the mask itself. The Comanche used war paint on their bodies, faces and even their horses, but each design was individualized, and not meant to conceal an individual warrior’s identity, but to enhance it.
Hamas has a far greater population growth. Against all calls that the Jews are carrying on a genocide against the population of Gaza, the population there have kids galore. They are proliferating and have high birth rates. Not so with the Comanches. The Comanches had high incident of miscarriages and never had many children. Their lives were just too tough. Gaza is a ward of the UN state, with little industry and no value added products. They breed without any underlying sustaining economics. The Comanche had the economy of the buffalo and the horse. These two commodities were everything, and they bred horses and hunted buffalo prolifically.
Finally, Hamas has sponsors and benefactors. The Palestinians are, in fact, a highly abused people who have been used as proxy fighters for multiple generations of Arab and Muslim leaders. The Commanche were native in all senses, and their allegiances were to no one. No one was setting them up to fight. They had a way of life, it was all they knew, they were estranged from most other natives, and they wanted to keep living as they had been. The Arabs in Gaza have been at the very cradle of civilization for thousands of years. They should not, in any way, retain the brutal and destructive ways of a people like the Comanches.
In fact, the larger conspiracies about Jews and the West have taken civilization backwards all across the larger Middle East. They have reduced the people of Gaza and wherever else their ideology reigns, into primitive backwaters, and such people will not be swayed by reason.
There were many treaties between the natives and the United States and the various states over the many decades of conflict, and none resulted in a lasting peace. The incentives were never there to make it work. The natives were far too fractured to bind the actions of other natives, so it hardly mattered who the US signed a treaty with; other natives, even younger men within the signatory tribe, could and would go break the treaty. The natives couldn’t enforce their side of the agreement.
Further, there were thousands of white settlers who viewed Manifest Destiny as a sort of national creed, and the US Army was not going to use violence to remove settlers. Treaties and agreements were tried, but the natives only signed them to get concessions, like free food and protected status on the reservations, and then they would still go out and raid, steal, and murder.
The same situation holds with the Jews in Israel and the jihadi tribes. Israel could sign a deal with the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas would still attack. A cease fire with Hamas won’t bind the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Hezbollah. There is no central authority for Israel to negotiate with, and there never will be. Even if there was, there are the personal vision of martyrdom held by millions more would-be jihadi terrorists. These are the ‘lone wolves,’ as they are called, rightly or not. The idea of waging war on Israel is cultural, not political, or strategic.
And further, the Israelis have their own version of Manifest Destiny, what might be called Greater Israel, and they are not going to give it up.
What is the answer? What works?
Peace was had when the natives, specifically the extremely warlike plains natives, were destroyed. The United States was secured by the destruction of these tribes, pure and simple. The progress of the country west was stopped along the southern frontier for nearly 30 years by the Comanche, who were master warriors, horsemen, and skilled archers. They were an incredibly effective cavalry, and they deserve respect for what they accomplished with so little, but they did not deserve to own the land and continue their way of life just because they were there first.
If there was a peaceful way to settle the issues, the Comanche would not have been able to help find it. They never learned to skillfully negotiate for what they wanted before they accepted reservation life, and they wouldn’t unite.
The enemies of the United States could have used the Comanche the same way Iran uses Hamas as a substitute army. If, for example, the British, or French, or Spanish had ever begun to use the Comanche as proxies., and make the cost of pushing westward even higher, perhaps the United States as we know it might not exist. However, what might exist in the central part of North American would not be better than what is here now.
And so, it is with Israel. Should Hamas ever win, what they will replace Israel with will be a larger version of Gaza; it will be a poverty-stricken shithole of suffering. The Israelis, for all their flaws, offer the best hope for all parties to live in peace and security in the land of Canaan. Destroying the killers, kidnapers, and gang rapists is the only way to win. The Israeli Jews deserve no less than to be able to win as others, including the United States, have won and then and only then will the river to the sea be peaceful as well as free.
TomRoushOnline 