Abandoning the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt would enable Hamas to carry on with its decades-long practice of smuggling weapons into the enclave. It would also allow the new head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, to escape – along with many of the hostages with whom he is thought to be surrounding himself for protection -- through the tunnels into Egypt's Sinai Desert.

The most recent statement from Hamas makes it clear that the terror group wants Israel to leave the Gaza Strip before any hostages are freed.

According to some reports, Hamas has stated that it is willing to free the hostages in stages. It undoubtedly wants to hold on to as many hostages as possible as an "insurance policy" that Israel will not resume the war against the terror group and that the terrorist group will be able to have a free hand to attack Israel in the future. This implies that a large number of the hostages remain captive in the hands of the terror group for years. It is important to note that for the past 10 years, Hamas has been holding hostage two Israeli civilians who are believed to be still alive, as well as the remains of two IDF soldiers.

Hamas is willing to fight to the last Palestinian. The terror group does not care if tens of thousands of its own people lose their lives as a result of the war it began. Its No. 1 priority is to hold on to power after the war. Hamas is evidently hoping that a ceasefire-hostage deal will help it achieve its goal of retaining control over the Gaza Strip.

If the Biden-Harris administration wants to understand the real intentions and aims of Hamas, it just needs to look at what the terror group is saying in Arabic. Hamas and its allies are saying in Arabic that the only deal they would accept is one that results in Israel raising a white flag.

If Hamas is permitted to win the war, Iran and its other terror proxies, such as Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis, will gain confidence and feel more empowered. In addition, this will convey to Muslim Jihadis worldwide that Israel and the West are too weak to protect their people and values against Islamist terror organizations. This weakness will lead to more terrorism not only against Israel, but also the US and most Western nations.

Instead of applying pressure on Israel to end the war, the Biden-Harris administration needs to demand firmly that the Hamas murderers and rapists totally surrender, disarm, cede control over the Gaza Strip, and release all the hostages unconditionally.

All this needs urgently needs to take place before Iran breaks out its nuclear weapons and sets about attacking its oil-rich neighbors, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, again.

The good news is that although a bloc of ultra-left groups, waving flags of Hamas and masquerading as defenders of Islam, won the largest number of seats, but not a majority, in the National Assembly, its leaders were not intelligent enough to cash their chips and seize a chunk of power in a deal with President Emmanuel Macron.

Their obstinacy and the raising of the Hamas flag inside the parliament have provoked an anti-Islam backlash opposed to Houellebecq and Kepel's forecasts. Thus, France isn't going to have an extremist president next year.

What has happened is that ultra-nationalist groups have seized the opportunity to portray themselves as the only xxxxxx against an "aggressive Islam" with the catchword "immigration" that causes "insecurity."

It was only a generation ago that France, or at least the opinion-making elite, had a quite different image of Islam. At that time, Islam was seen as a deeply spiritual discipline best explained by mystics such as Ibn al-Arabi and poets such as Roumi.

The soft image that French Islamologues created was used by militant Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the Khomeinists of Iran and Lebanon, remnants of the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) and more recently ISIS to cast themselves as "victims" of colonialism, imperialism and even racism and avoid close scrutiny, while they built no-go fiefdoms around Paris and provincial centers to promote ideologies far from Ibn al-Arabi and Roumi; let alone St. Aldebert and Meister Eckhart.

Between 1980 and 2020, the French state spent more than $30 billion in its "Islamic" suburbs in the hope of preventing what Macron describes as "separatism." The project, most enthusiastically implemented by ministers such as Bernard Tapie and Jean-Louis Borloo, produced the opposite of what was desired. It helped local qaids (chiefs) to create a larger clientele and tighten their control on the "separatist" suburbs.

The first re-reading [of Islam] assumed that French Muslims were owed something and engendered a policy built on guilty feeling that used bribery and apology as tools of an imaginary reconciliation. The latest re-reading plays in the hands of the small minority of radical extremists who divide the world into "them and us."

Both re-readings promote the very "separatism" that Macron warns about.