Posted on 04/27/2005 3:58:33 AM PDT by IAF ThunderPilot
Official Palestinian Authority (PA) sponsored television broadcast a sermon this past Friday that accused Israel and the United States of seeking to conquer the Arab world.
"Our enemies want to occupy Arab and Islamic lands, under their leadership," Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris declared in his weekly sermon. The imam (Islamic preacher) is on the payroll of the PA, according to Hebrew University Professor and Arab Affairs expert Dr. Michael Widlanski, who translated the sermon.
Therefore, the speech was essentially broadcast and financed by the PA, whose chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has repeatedly stated his committment to eliminate incitement against Israel and the US.
"Our enemy has become strong and fed on us like prey in our lands, in the East and in the West, because we are weak, and our only strength lies in the Koran," Mudeiris said in his speech.
Mudeiris also declared that the "enemy" had deliberately tried to cause "civil war" among the Arab world. Abu Mazen himself last month told Egyptian journalists that any attempts to reign in terror groups would lead to "civil war."
The Islamic preacher did not mention America and Israel by name, referring only to the countries as the "occupiers." The term "occupiers" is a word used in the Muslim world for both the United States and Israel whose forces are respectively called "the American Occupation Army" and "the Israeli Occupation Army."
Widlanski claims that Abu Mazen has shown "intermittent restraint" with regard to the broadcasts, immediately following Israeli or American pressure. While most "martyr films" have been removed from PA TV, there has been a "parallel promotion of atrocity stories about Israelis deliberately murdering Palestinian children."
Futhermore, Widlanski adds, "there has been an increase in the use of certain code-words such as 'resistance operations' and 'martyrs' that glorify, rather than condemn, certain attacks on Israeli targets."
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