Communist China Supports Hamas

An Israeli soldier stands on a tank near the border with Gaza, in Southern Israel, on Feb. 9, 2024. Amir Levy/Getty Images

Commentary

It is perhaps not surprising that communist China would aid and abet the terror group Hamas.

Let us count how Beijing has provided support to Hamas since the terror attack on innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.

Weapons to Hamas

Back in January, according to Newsweek, “Israeli Defense Forces said they found caches of made-in-China materiel [in Gaza], including equipment such as cartridges and rifle sights for M16 assault rifles, automatic grenade launchers, and communications devices.”

Regardless of whether or not those weapons were provided directly to Hamas by China, note that there has been no condemnation of Hamas using Chinese weapons by Chinese diplomats or state-run media to date.

Diplomatic Shade to Hamas

Beijing led early calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, which would amount to locking in Hamas’s gains without paying a steep price for its terrorist acts.

Breitbart noted just 10 days after the Hamas terror attack that the state-run Global Times had already started “[propagating] the phony moral equivalence line whereby the Chinese government pretends to be ‘neutral’ and deplore all violence but actually supports … Hamas and seeks to protect them from any Israeli military response.”

This is the basis for Beijing’s continuing calls for a ceasefire. China’s adoption of Hamas’s narrative continued, as reported by the South China Morning Post on Nov. 2, when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi “[urged] Israel to stop its ‘collective punishment’ of people in Gaza.”

As reported by Beijing’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, on Dec. 20, Zhang Jun, then China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, continued that narrative while informing the United Nations Security Council that “we urge Israel to immediately reverse its course of action and stop its indiscriminate military attacks and collective punishment against the people of Gaza [emphasis added].”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has also supported the Hamas party line by urging global efforts for a two-state solution without once mentioning Hamas and the Oct. 7 terror attack, supporting various U.N. ceasefire resolutions, and facilitating a meeting between representatives of rival Palestinian groups Hamas and Fatah in Beijing on April 30. The communists are apparently perfectly fine with engaging with Hamas if that helps the Chinese regime supplant the United States as the key power broker in the Middle East.

Shade to Iran

Iran is a key backer of the Hamas terrorist organization, as well as other anti-Israel terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. On the diplomatic front, Chinese leader Xi Jinping honored Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi with a face-to-face meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in early 2023.

NBC News reported that Xi gave unequivocal support for Iran in a public statement: “China supports Iran in safeguarding national sovereignty [and] resisting unilateralism and bullying.” That meeting concluded with the signing of 20 cooperation agreements between the two countries in the face of U.S. sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program and oil industry.

On the economic front, Iran joined China’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization in September 2021, with China subsequently becoming Iran’s top crude oil customer in 2023, as reported by Reuters. Money from oil sales goes directly to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which provides command and control, intelligence, planning, weapons, and logistics support to Hamas and other terror groups.

That linkage was confirmed again, as Fox News reported that an Israeli airstrike near Damascus, Syria, on April 1 killed the Iranian General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s commander of its elite Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon who was directly involved in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

Concluding Thoughts

Communist China’s laundry list of actions in support of Hamas continues to grow. During a meeting late last month in Beijing with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged that the United States “should not interfere in China’s internal affairs,” according to a Global Times report on April 26.

An April 23 Daily Caller News Foundation report cited a New York University professor who believes that “China is spreading pro-Hamas sentiment on college campuses” through manipulated content on TikTok, the social media application developed by the Chinese company ByteDance. For example, the article reported that there are 52 pro-Hamas videos on TikTok for every pro-Israel video. That is hardly coincidental.

The CCP condemns Israel’s acts of self-defense in response to the worst terrorist attack suffered by Jews since the Holocaust. Perhaps the civilized world should demand that Beijing’s calls for a ceasefire in Gaza that would ultimately save Hamas be repurposed into a ceasefire that stops the CCP’s ongoing cultural genocide in East Turkmenistan and Tibet. That’s the kind of “interfering in China’s internal affairs” that most civilized people could support.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.