Jordanian Cleric Says Islamic Law Bars Killing of ‘Wicked Heretic’ Jews
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by David Daoud
Jordanian cleric Ali Hassan Al-Halabi, who said the perfidious killing of Jews by Palestinians is forbidden by Islamic law. Photo: MEMRI/Screenshot.
Video footage of a Jordanian Salafist sheikh declaring that the killing of Jews by Palestinians is forbidden by Islamic law has recently been circulating widely on Arabic language social media networks, amid the recent surge in terrorist attacks against Israelis, local news website nrg reported on Monday.
The clip, available on the Middle East Media Research Institute’s website, was first posted to the Internet in February and features Amman-based Sheikh Ali Hassan Al-Halabi condemning the murder of Israelis.
“Someone who provides you with protection, electricity and water, who transfers you money and allows you to work. And then you kill him?! Even if he’s a Jew!” he says, clarifying, “This killing is [only] permissible in direct confrontation, during a declared war.”
Al-Halabi asserts that Islamic law prohibits “pledg[ing] for the safety of another, and then betraying him and killing him [perfidiously],” and that “shari’a agreements that protect people’s rights and lives” trump the “emotional perspective.”
Questioned about whether this principle applies to Israeli soldiers as well as civilians, the cleric replies, “The answer is the same.”
He even goes as far as to say, “Our brothers in Palestine tell us that the Jews do not attack anyone who does not attack them.”
Nevertheless, he adds, “Nobody should think that by saying this I am defending the accursed Jews. But this is the reality. If they killed any Muslim they saw, nobody would be left in Palestine. All the people would leave Palestine. They would flee to other countries. But all the people there stay put — in the 1967 territories, the 1948 territories, and Jerusalem. They remain there, with the Jews around them with their weapons.”
He also asserts that Jewish restraint arose out of “wickedness and heresy,” and not genuine morality. “They want to be able to say: ‘We are better than the Muslims, who kill us unprovoked. We don’t do that.'”
