Bassam Hussein is a Muslim Arab who teaches at a Norwegian university. He delivered a lecture on April 21 in which he described the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 as “the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century.” This “most beautiful thing” included the mass rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders of 1,200 Israelis and others. As part of this “most beautiful thing,” Hamas members tied family members together with wire and burned them alive; they stabbed babies to death; its “fighters” not only raped girls, but then stuck knives in their vaginas; they sliced off the breasts of women; they cut off the genitals of men; they gouged out the eyes of both men and women before killing them. But Bassam Hussein, who teaches in Norway, insists those attacks were “the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century.”
More on his view, and how his university responded, can be found here: “Norwegian university professor: October 7 attacks ‘most beautiful thing to happen in our century,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, May 3, 2026:
A Norwegian university professor called the October 7 Hamas attacks “the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century.”
Bassam Hussein, a project management professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, made the comments during an April 21 lecture organized by the Socialist Forum.
During his section about conflict in the Middle East, Hussein called October 7 “the most beautiful thing that has happened in our century,” adding that it revealed, “there is no such thing as Israeli superiority.”
“Israel sold Jewish immigrants an idea. A kind of five-star settler life there. They told Jewish immigrants: come to us. Here you will get the finest life. You will get a home, a house, an apartment, a car, a job financed by Americans. And the only thing you have to do is serve in the army for 18 months. And that’s it. Then you can go and live. You can also have citizenship and everything. This is paradise. October 7 proved that this is not true at all.
Hussein has a bizarre view of why Jews move to Israel. Not because they want to lead a Jewish life, he thinks, nor because they are fleeing antisemitism, nor because they want to take part in building a Jewish commonwealth, and in defending its existence, but for the free housing he thinks they receive. After all, he knows that the main reason Muslims move to Europe is to receive all the benefits that that they can obtain from the generous welfare states of the continent; he assumes that Jews move to Israel for the same reasons. Furthermore, Israelis do not serve in the army for only 18 months and then are done with military duty, as Bassam Hussein thinks. The men serve for 30-32 months (for males) and 24 months (for females). And beyond that, Israeli men must also serve as reservists for two months each year until the age of 40.
October 7 showed that no matter how strong you are, you still have vulnerabilities. And an intelligent, smart Palestinian military leader with 400 people can actually hurt them badly. So Israel became like a kind of dragon, a huge dragon spitting fire in all directions, that got a needle in its backside. That’s it. A needle in the backside.”
There was no one “military leader” leading the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Yahya Sinwar, the main architect of the attack, did not take part in it, but remained underground in a tunnel in Gaza. Six thousand Hamas combatants, not “400 people,” launched their surprise attack on civilians at a dance party and in their homes in border kibbutzim. And by the evening of October 7, the IDF had already began to launch a massive counterattack, with Israelis showing amazing powers of resilience and resolve, and Israel’s response continued over more than two years of fighting, in order to dismantle Hamas as a fighting force, killing at least 40,000 of its combatants, destroying almost all of its weaponry, and forcing what remains of the terror group to move into less than half of Gaza, while Israel remains in firm control of all the rest.
Photo Credit: NTNU in Trondheim by Shekko, Creative Commons.