This year’s April Fools belong to the Bush administration for believing that they can pander to Islamic terrorists and expect the outcome to be peace.
A New York Times article by Steven Erlanger dated April 1, “In Gaza, Hamas’s Fiery Insults to Jews Complicate Peace Effort,” discusses some of the problems in the region. All quotations are from that article.
Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas said of the Jews: “Their fate is their vanishing.”
At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.
Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.
Consider the insanity of the the imam simultaneously cursing the Danish cartoons, which either criticized actual problems within Islam or merely depicted Muhammad in a neutral way, and spewing overt bigotry against Jews.
The film Fitna, which I discussed yesterday, shows a video of a little girl repeating, at the encouragement of an adult woman, the same bigotry against Jews. Yet some Muslims decry Fitna as “hate speech” — without breathing a word against the actual hate speech by Muslims against Jews.
The article continues:
[I]n a column in the weekly Al Risalah, Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that “suffering by fire is the Jews’ destiny in this world and the next.”
“The reason for the punishment of burning is that it is fitting retribution for what they have done,” Mr. Astal wrote on March 13. “But the urgent question is, is it possible that they will have the punishment of burning in this world, before the great punishment” of hell? Many religious leaders believe so, he said, adding, “Therefore we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the Jews.”
One point of Fitna is precisely that some modern Muslims draw a violent message from the Quran. Yet some Muslims direct their anger against Fitna, rather than against those Muslims who do, in fact, draw a violent message from the Quran.
Is it not obvious that, for peace to succeed in the Middle East, Muslims there have to stop murdering Jews and advocating the annihilation of Israel?