Editor's Letter

A Disquieting Sermon

JIT

December 1.2005

toll to 6 million, he argued, "to win over the media
and to gain the world sympathy"
Making one wild stretch after another, Mudeiris
claimed that America would be de-fanged, "Allah will-
ing," just as other super powers have been.
He reinforced the real intent of Islamic fundamen-
talism when he declared, "We have ruled the world
before and, by Allah, the day will come when we will
rule the entire world again." Under this doctrine, the
Jews will suffer "because they are treacherous by
nature, as they have been throughout history."
His summation was essentially a war cry. "The day
will come,' he said, "when everything will be relieved
of the Jews, even the stones and trees, which were
harmed by them:'
He's saying that we have poisoned nature and life
itself. "Listen to the Prophet Muhammad;' he said,
"who tells you about the evil end that awaits the Jews.
The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish
off every Jew."

"Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who

tells you about the evil end that awaits

the Jews. The stones and trees will want

the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

—Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris

To counter the impact of high-profile Palestinian
preachers like the sheik, world Jews must take stock of
what it means to be Jewish and part of a people. Each
of us must commit something to strengthen the
Jewish community and the Jewish state.
We can start by focusing on university life, a cru-
cible of all-important impression building for unsus-
pecting students and faculty alike. Our combined
investment of emotion, virtue, resolve and money will
yield big dividends. It will unmask divestment as just
one symptom of a calculated, relentless campaign to
permeate the essence of campus debate, learning and
interplay with high doses of hate for Israel and for Am
Yisrael Chai, the Eternal Nation — the Jewish people.
I can't say it any plainer. These are grave times. 0

POI NTS TO PONDER.

on't think for an instant that Islamists — reli-
gious zealots spewing anti-Zionist vile and
espousing terror against the Jewish people —
have moderated since Yasser Arafat's death a year ago.
The Palestinian leader's hatred toward anyone and
anything Jewish lives on, unconditionally, among
Islamic clerics who sway millions
of susceptible Palestinians.
This is why diaspora Jews in
general, but American Jews espe-
cially, must look behind the drapes
of their assimilated comfort and
see the Israel divestment resolu-
tions on university campuses for
Robert A. Sklar what they really are. Pro-
Ed itor
Palestinian propagandists would
like to get universities to divest but
are more interested in demonizing Israel by infecting
campus discourse. They seek to manipulate those stu-
dents and professors who buy into the lie that Israel is
guilty of gross human rights violations.
An e-mail letter making the rounds in the
Jewish world last week grabbed my attention.
The cyber letter contained a short video of Sheik
Ibrahim Mudeiris' Friday service aired May 13
on Palestinian Authority TV. The sheik, a
Palestinian Khatib, or a P.A.-paid preacher, is no
stranger to Jew bashing. His strident "holy
speech" is six months old. I don't know why it
resurfaced on the cyber circuit, but I'm sure that
the sheik maintains his warped belief that "the
Jews are behind the suffering of the nations!'
Wherever I went last week — to the store, to
synagogue, out with friends — the sermon came
up, signaling the effectiveness of cyberspace in
spreading the word.
Mudeiris, an Arafat favorite, didn't work up to his
punch line. His first sentence took aim and fired.
"Allah has tormented us with 'the people most hostile
to the believers' — the Jews',' he said, according to a
translation by the Washington-based Middle East
Media Research Institute.
He came back with a second blow."With the estab-
lishment of the State of Israel:' he said, "the entire
Islamic nation was lost because Israel is a cancer
spreading through the body of the Islamic nation, and
because the Jews are a virus resembling AIDS from
which the entire world suffers."
The terror mongers aren't dumb. They know that
Israel's destruction would forever divide the Jewish
people. By severing our bonds, they would undermine
our power and influence.
To illustrate his contention that we have been
behind world strife, Mudeiris cited the reactive tor-
ture imposed on Jews over the centuries by Great
Britain, France, Portugal and Czarist Russia.
He argued that we provoked Nazism by using the
Zionist movement to spur other countries to boycott
German merchandise. He acknowledged the
Holocaust and called it a crime, but argued that its
horrors against our people "are no worse than what
the Jews are doing in Palestine." We inflated our death

What must Jewish communal leaders at all levels
do to quell the alarming spread of "Down with
Zionism" rhetoric on university campuses?

Is American Jewry blind to the continuing
Palestinian foment against Israel, which ultimate-
ly is intended to wipe out the Jews as a people?

E-mail responses to: letters@thejewishnews.com

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