Conclusion
The accusation of dawah team against the Bible regarding the destruction of Amalek is invalid. What YHWH did in commanding the extirpation of the Amalekites was a judgment upon a vicious gang of murderous enslavers. This was no ethnic or religious pogrom or genocide, like the IS massacres of Alawites and Shia; rather, it was the punishment of a violent robbery gang, engaged in slave-raiding.
Just as popular opinion across the world was revolted by the massacres of innocent people and organised rape of Yezidi girls by IS such that they demanded the destruction of such a malicious entity, the same was true of Amalek. Also, the contrast between the Hadith and the Bible on the issue of massacre is clear. The Bible records the command to destroy a gang of incorrigible thugs, not innocent civilians.
I suspect that in the USA, there would have been greater reliance on Genesis 12 to explain the
the treatment of the enemies of Israel:
12 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
This is not helpful to many who still want to know if there is justification for genocide, including children or innocent non-combatants in the world that we currently inhabit. What is missing in most discussions is the unlikely event that a person today would be both sane and proposing genocide at the direction of God at the same time. Modern Christians believe that God speaks to them through the Bible. Prophets speaking to God and directing the affairs of justice does not go on today except as aberrations like Jim Jones and David Koresh. This is the reason the Jews closed their books or scrolls in about 90 AD and the reason there are not any legitimate new books of the Bible named after new Prophets. (Mormanism excepted but I deny any legitimacy to them)
I totally reject the theory that God did something evil in the Old Testament when people were ordered killed. God can do anything He wants and any way He wants. Just because we don’t confidently know why something happened does not mean that there was no reason or no good reason for it. The explanation that we might derive with a questionable quantity of evidence can not be as reliable as the factors and knowledge that God can bring to the situation. There is no good reason to take what happened in the Old Testament as a universal model for present behavior. People used to practice bleeding as medicine, but we would not use that today. The New Testament raises standards and expectations.