11-May-08: "Cease-fire is only so we can prepare for the final battle..."

“It does not matter what the Jews do. We will not let them have peace,” Ibrahim Mudeiris, the imam of the Ijlin Mosque in Gaza, told me not long ago. We spoke after Friday prayers. The street outside the mosque was crowded with angry young men who had been excited by Mudeiris’s sermon, in which he identified Jews as “the sons of apes and pigs.” “They can be nice to us or they can kill us, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “If we have a cease-fire with the Jews, it is only so that we can prepare ourselves for the final battle.”

The American writer Jeffrey Goldberg, in a 2008 essay in The Atlantic magazine, quoting the prominent Islamic leader, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris of the Sheikh 'Ijlin Mosque in Palestinian-Arab Gaza. Mudeiris routinely speaks on official Palestinian Authority TV, preaching a message of jihadist racism, hatred and incitement to murder.

In 2005, Mudairis in his capacity as moral compass and definer of religious pathways on behalf of the Palestinian regime offered this gem of spiritual insight:

We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again. The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we will rule Britain and the entire world – except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule, because they are treacherous by nature, as they have been throughout history. The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews - even the stones and trees which were harmed by them. Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew.

Sometimes, some of us need reminding of what it takes to create a people a majority of whom favour murdering their neighbors via suicide bombs. For an additional reminder, see our earlier blog entry "What the Palestinian-Arab silent majority really thinks".