U.K. Silent on Pope’s Meeting With Mufti Who Wants to Kill Jews
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by Adam Levick
Pope Francis. Photo: Casa Rosada via Wikimedia Commons.
A report at the Independent by Ben Lynfield focuses on Palestinian activists who are “scathing about the Pope’s plans to make the first visit by a pontiff to the tomb of Theodor Herzl” – the founder of Zionisism. Zionism is the political movement, Lynfield explains, “that established Israel and displaced the Palestinians.”
Lynfield continues:
Omar Barghouti, a Ramallah-based member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, termed the planned visit to the grave “nauseating”.
“Laying a wreath on the grave of the founder of Zionism, a patently racist ideology that has served to enable and justify the ethnic cleansing of most of the indigenous people of Palestine, is a nauseating, offensive act of complicity that Palestinian civil society cannot but condemn,” Mr Barghouti wrote in an emailed statement. He added that the gesture would “serve to whitewash Israel’s occupation and apartheid”.
Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s central council, also questioned the Pope’s choice. He said that if the Pope is to visit Herzl’s tomb, he should make a visit to the Yasser Arafat mausoleum in Ramallah for “balance”
Of course, neither Lynfield nor any of his colleagues within the U.K. media have yet noted that, although the Pope will not be visiting the grave of the ‘father of modern terrorism,”Ž’ he will be meeting with the Grand Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein. The Grand Mufti is the most senior religious figure in the Palestinian Authority (the Palestinian equivalent of the Israeli Chief Rabbi), and has an appalling record of extreme anti-Semitic hate speech and support for suicide bombings.
Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported the following:
What Pope Francis may not be aware of is that the Mufti has an ongoing record of vicious Antisemitic hate speech, which has been condemned internationally.In 2012, the Mufti preached that it is Muslim destiny to kill the Jews. On a different occasion, in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he taught that Jews were “enemies of Allah,” and in another speech he said that the souls of suicide bombers “tell us to follow in their path.”
PMW recently cited a speech, broadcast on PA television in January 2012, from a Fatah celebration in East Jerusalem, where the Mufti endorsed the murder of Jews.
Here’s the transcript:
Moderator at Fatah ceremony: “Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs (i.e., Jews) is a war of religion and faith.
Long Live Fatah! [I invite you,] our honorable Sheikh.”
Palestinian Authority Mufti Muhammad Hussein:“47 years ago the [Fatah] revolution started. Which revolution? The modern revolution
of the Palestinian people’s history.
In fact, Palestine in its entirety is a revolution,
since [Caliph] Umar came [to conquer Jerusalem, 637 CE],
and continuing today, and until the End of Days.
The reliable Hadith (tradition attributed to Muhammad),
in the two reliable collections, Bukhari and Muslim, says:‘The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews.The Jew will hide behind stones or trees.Then the stones or trees will call:‘Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’Except the Gharqad tree [which will keep silent].’Therefore, it is no wonder that you see Gharqad [trees]surrounding the [Israeli] settlements and colonies.
[Gharqad trees] surrounding, surrounding and surrounding.
That’s the Palestine we are talking about,
with the beginning of the Jihad and the continuation of the Jihad,
with the struggle and the procession of the Martyrs.”[PA TV (Fatah), Jan. 9, 2012]
As PMW explained, not only didn’t the Grand Mufti retract or condemn these statements by the moderator, but instead cited the Hadith to buttress the narrative that Palestinians are indeed destined to murder the Jews.
Though the U.K. media often characterize mainstream Israeli politicians who are on the right side of the political spectrum as “ultra-nationalist,” “far-right,” or even “extreme”, it seems certain that journalists working for the Independent, Guardian, Economist, Telegraph, or other newspapers covering Pope Francis’s visit to Israel, will fail to use similar pejoratives when reporting on his meeting with the PA Mufti who incites Palestinians to kill Jews.
As was demonstrated recently by a Guardian op-ed’s shameful justification for unparalleled anti-Semitism within Palestinian society, such egregious double-standards in moral accountability (the bigotry of low expectations) continue to skew the media’s coverage of the region, and deny news consumers the opportunity to fairly assess those dynamics which truly represent the ‘root cause’ of the conflict.
Adam Levick is the managing editor of CiF Watch, an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
