by Bassam Tawil
In the Middle East, thousands of Israelis have been murdered or wounded as a direct result of such rhetoric. Palestinians, like the imams in the United States, have long been spreading lies and libels against Israel and Jews.
"Oh Allah, destroy the criminal Zionists and those that support them. Count them one by one, kill them to the very last one, and do not spare a single one of them." — Chicago-Area Imam Zayd Mohammad, MEMRI, July 3, 2026.
Mosques in the United States also distribute manuals... which authorize violent jihad, slavery, and the killing of apostates and non-Muslims.
"These manuals describe in detail for Muslims to carry out physical (fighting) Jihad, Child marriages (authorized), Slavery (authorized), the beating of women (authorized), killing of non-Muslims and even Muslims who are not Sharia compliant, informing Muslims to never take as friends Christians and Jews, killing of Apostates of Islam (authorized anywhere in the world), and the describing the objective of Islam which is to establish an Islamic Ummah (nation) worldwide and under Sharia law." — Jihad Watch, July 17, 2026.
Experts and films cited by Jihad Watch warn of "cultural jihad," a strategy to use the laws and rights of Western countries to undermine their societies and establish an Islamic Caliphate.
Westerners who are willing to accept such inflammatory rhetoric in the name of "freedom of speech" may be beginning to realize that some words are meant to kill.
In the Middle East, thousands of Israelis have been murdered or wounded as a direct result of such rhetoric. Palestinians, like the imams in the United States, have long been spreading lies and libels against Israel and Jews.
It is worth noting that the Palestinian Authority, which is often described as Israel's "peace partner," is funded by several Western countries, especially the European Union. This means that those Western countries continue to provide financial assistance to a Palestinian government that openly glorifies and rewards terrorists who murder Jews as part of what is known as the "Pay-for-Slay" program.
Nearly three years after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the PA continues to employ one of the most dangerous forms of incitement: the totally false claim that Jews are "storming" or "violently invading" the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
This description is demonstrably a lie. Jewish visitors do not enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself. They tour the Temple Mount compound, outdoors, peacefully under police supervision, and do not enter any mosque.
The Islamic Waqf, which administers the compound, has never imposed a blanket prohibition on non-Muslim visits. Jews should be able to go there.
The October 7 massacre was not launched because of any attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It was launched because Hamas exploited a false narrative that Palestinian leaders have been cultivating since the 1920s — literally for over a hundred years.
Instead of preparing Palestinians for coexistence, mutual recognition and peace, the PA continues to prepare them for perpetual conflict...
If the international community is actually serious about reforming the Palestinian Authority, it must demand not only financial accountability but also an immediate end to official incitement against Israel and Jews.
The United States and other Western countries also need to pay attention to what is being said by their politicians and in their mosques. Many immigrants to the West seem determined to recreate in their new homes the Islamic societies they walked out on.
Muslim imams in the United States continue to teach jihadist ideology and Islamic supremacism, promote anti-Western sentiments and antisemitism, and incite violence against non-Muslims.
"The Fourth of July has nothing to do with us," Islamic scholar Hamaad El-Ameen declared in a Friday sermon on July 3, 2026 at the Islamic Center of Chattanooga, Tennessee. "That is not a declaration of independence for us. Our allegiance is to Allah."
He was addressing members of his community who were considering spending the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence barbequing with their families.
"Oh Allah, destroy the criminal Zionists and those that support them," Chicago-area Imam Zayd Mohammad prayed on the same day. "Count them one by one, kill them to the very last one, and do not spare a single one of them."
A week later, also in a Friday sermon, Michigan Shiite scholar Hassan Qazwini, founder of the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, praised Iran's slain Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as "the leader of the Islamic Revolution" and "the martyred imam." Qazwini said that the millions of mourners who attended Khamenei's funeral in Iran and Iraq sent a clear message that they honor leaders who sacrifice themselves for Islam and for dignity.
"I would like to mention that last week witnessed a great and historic funeral in Iran and Iraq – the funeral of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, the martyred imam, who was martyred and whose blood was spilled while defending his land, his honor, and that of the Islamic nation, as well as his religion."
Mosques in the United States also distribute manuals such as Reliance of the Traveler and Sahih Bukhari, which authorize violent jihad, slavery, and killing apostates and non-Muslims. According to Jihad Watch:
"These manuals describe in detail for Muslims to carry out physical (fighting) Jihad, Child marriages (authorized), Slavery (authorized), the beating of women (authorized), killing of non-Muslims and even Muslims who are not Sharia compliant, informing Muslims to never take as friends Christians and Jews, killing of Apostates of Islam (authorized anywhere in the world), and the describing the objective of Islam which is to establish an Islamic Ummah (nation) worldwide and under Sharia law."
One imam informed Dave Gaubatz, a retired U.S. federal agent, counter-terrorism expert and Arabic linguist:
"[T]here has not been another 911 such attack in America because Islam is winning and at this point another large scale attack would set their movement back 25 years. When a large scale attack is required to further subdue Americans it will then be carried out. The plans are already in place. The Islamic leaders know there will be small scale terrorist attacks such as with Fort Hood, Texas, the Boston Bombings and others that will put fear into the hearts of the American people and its government. Islamic leaders realize the liberal leaders and politicians will label these attacks as 'Lone Wolf" attacks and disassociate them from mainstream Islam".
Experts and films cited by Jihad Watch warn of "cultural jihad," a strategy to use the laws and rights of Western countries to undermine their societies and establish an Islamic Caliphate.
Westerners who are willing to accept such inflammatory rhetoric in the name of "freedom of speech" may be beginning to realize that some words are meant to kill.
In the Middle East, thousands of Israelis have been murdered or wounded as a direct result of such rhetoric. Palestinians, like the imams in the United States, have long been spreading lies and libels against Israel and Jews. Most of the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement is coming from the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was established in 1994 in accordance with the Oslo Accord signed the previous year between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
It is worth noting that the Palestinian Authority, which is often described as Israel's "peace partner," is funded by several Western countries, especially the European Union. This means that those Western countries continue to provide financial assistance to a Palestinian government that openly glorifies and rewards terrorists who murder Jews as part of what is known as the "Pay-for-Slay" program.
Nearly three years after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 massacre in Israel, the PA continues to employ one of the most dangerous forms of incitement: the totally false claim that Jews are "storming" or "violently invading" the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
This rhetoric is inflammatory, irresponsible, and potentially lethal.
Whenever Jews visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, official PA media and leaders describe the visits as "violent incursions into the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque."
This description is demonstrably a lie. Jewish visitors do not enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque itself. They tour the Temple Mount compound, outdoors, peacefully under police supervision, and do not enter any mosque.
Equally misleading is the PA's routine characterization of all Jewish visitors as "extremist settlers." Such language deliberately portrays every Jew visiting Judaism's holiest site as a dangerous religious fanatic bent on provoking Muslims. Many of the visitors, however, are ordinary Israelis or tourists exercising their legal right to visit one of the holiest places in Judaism.
The Temple Mount is sacred not only to Muslims but also to Jews. It is the site of the First and Second Jewish Temples and has occupied a central place in Jewish history and faith for more than three thousand years. Jews resumed visiting the site since Israel reunited Jerusalem in 1967. The Islamic Waqf, which administers the compound, has never imposed a blanket prohibition on non-Muslim visits. Jews should be able to go there.
Those visits were temporarily suspended only after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. That uprising itself serves as a tragic reminder of the deadly consequences of Palestinian incitement. The Second Intifada erupted after then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. The Palestinian leadership immediately portrayed his visit as an assault on Islam and falsely claimed that Israel intended to seize or destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The violence that followed became known as the "Al-Aqsa Intifada." Hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians lost their lives.
Yet, despite years of bloodshed, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, deliberately constructed on the site of the two destroyed Jewish temples, has remained exactly where it has stood since it was built. It was never attacked, destroyed, or "desecrated." The accusations proved entirely fabricated.
The Palestinian leadership, nevertheless, continues to recycle the same shopworn libel under the slogan that "Al-Aqsa is in danger."
The latest statements issued by the Palestinian Authority show that nothing has changed. After the recent visit to the Temple Mount by Jewish visitors, the office of PA President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what it called the "storming of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyards." The presidency described the visits as a "flagrant violation" of the historical and legal status quo and accused Israel of pursuing "a systematic policy aimed at imposing new realities on the ground" and attempting to divide the compound "temporally and spatially."
Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Abbas's senior adviser on religious affairs and the PA's Supreme Sharia Judge, escalated the rhetoric even further. He warned that Israeli actions at the Temple Mount "would push the entire region toward further tension and explosion, fueling the flames of religious war and threatening regional and international security and stability."
The PA's "Jerusalem Governorate" likewise claimed that the Jewish visits represented "the most dangerous escalation" in months and wrongly accused Israel of seeking to impose sovereignty over the compound. Meanwhile, he promoted the fairy tale of the non-existent construction of a Jewish Temple in place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque — an exact reversal, in fact, of what the Muslims had done.
By repeatedly using expressions such as "storming," "aggression," "attacks," "extremist settlers," and warnings about alleged Israeli plans to divide or seize the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Palestinian Authority continues to promote one of the oldest and most dangerous conspiracy theories: that Jews are plotting to destroy Islam's holy sites.
Such accusations repeatedly lead to bloodshed. Presumably that is why they keep being used.
In September 2015, Abbas declared:
"We salute every drop of blood spilled for the sake of Jerusalem. This blood is clean, pure blood, shed for the sake of Allah... The Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher are ours. They are all ours, and they [Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We shall not allow them to do so..."
Within days, Palestinians launched a wave of stabbing attacks against Israelis that became known as the "Knife Intifada." Dozens of Israelis were murdered or wounded. The attacks were carried out by Palestinians convinced they were defending the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Unfortunately, most often the international community, the media and so-called human rights groups appear to believe it too.
This is just one example of how words are used to kill. When political and religious leaders tell their people that their holy places are under attack, many conclude that they have a religious obligation to defend them through violence.
The Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group elevated the same false narrative into the principal pretext for the October 7, 2023 massacre. Significantly, Hamas named its assault "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," making clear that it sought to portray the massacre as a response to fictitious Israeli threats against the holy sites of Islam.
Announcing the operation on October 7, the late Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif announced that the invasion was launched in response to what he described as Israel's repeated "storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque" and its alleged "destruction." of the holy site. He called on the broader Arab and Islamic world to rise to defend the mosque under a wholly fabricated pretext.
In subsequent statements, Hamas, in similar words, repeated the Palestinian Authority's claims that the massacre was launched because of what it called Israel's efforts to "Judaize Jerusalem," divide the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and facilitate repeated "settler incursions" into the compound.
The difference was that Hamas translated those accusations into mass murder. The October 7 massacre was not launched because of any attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque. It was launched because Hamas exploited a false narrative that Palestinian leaders have been cultivating since the 1920s — literally for over a hundred years. If it works, why change it?
The mosque stood untouched before October 7, 2023, and it stands untouched today.
Instead of preparing Palestinians for coexistence, mutual recognition and peace, the PA continues to prepare them for perpetual conflict by portraying Jews as enemies of Islam and presenting visits to Judaism's holiest site as an assault on Muslim faith.
This should wake up the international community. Western governments often speak of reforming the Palestinian Authority by strengthening institutions, promoting transparency, and combating financial and administrative corruption. These are worthwhile objectives. Institutional reform alone, however, will not bring peace.
The words need to change. The narrative needs to change. The incitement must stop.
If the international community is actually serious about reforming the Palestinian Authority, it must demand not only financial accountability but also an immediate end to official incitement against Israel and Jews.
The United States and other Western countries also need to pay attention to what is being said by their politicians and in their mosques. Many immigrants to the West seem determined to recreate in their new homes the Islamic societies they walked out on.
Bassam Tawil is a Muslim Arab based in the Middle East. His work is made possible through the generous donation of a couple who wish to remain anonymous. Gatestone is most grateful.
Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22760/words-meant-to-kill
No comments:
Post a Comment