‘The Filth of the Jews’
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Just a few hours before the latest suicide bomb attack on Israel killed at least 16 people in Haifa and injured at least 60, a wire crossed our desk from the Zionist Organization of America. It called attention to the broadcast, on the television station of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, of a sermon from the Sheikh Ijlin Mosque in Gaza. In the sermon, according to a translation by the American government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Sheikh Ibrahim Mudayris declared “O Allah, cleanse our country from the filth of the Jews. O Allah, cleanse our holy places from the filth of the Jews.”
That message was broadcast on February 28. It’s just one example among hundreds of the incitement to violence of which the Palestinian Authority is regularly guilty. The Palestinian Authority mouthed condemnation of yesterday’s attack in Haifa. And the bomber himself may have actually been, as security sources told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, a member of the terrorist group Hamas. Yet there can be no question that, as the foreign ministry in Jerusalem made clear, it is Mr. Arafat who is ultimately responsible for the attack. The recent federal indictment against alleged members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group includes, as The New York Sun reported on February 24, an assertion that in October of 2000, “a Palestinian leader had given terror organizations permission to commit violent acts.”
Particularly offensive is the suggestion by Mr. Arafat’s aides, and by some in the American press, that yesterday’s attack in Haifa was somehow equivalent to the Israel Defense Force’s operations in recent weeks in territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority. It’s a mendacious comparison. The IDF operations are designed to capture or kill terrorists who are targeting innocent Israeli civilians. It is neither the intent nor the policy to kill innocent Palestinian Arabs, and every effort is made to avoid such deaths. The Palestinian Arab terrorists, unlike the Israelis, are actually setting forth with the goal of killing as many innocent civilians as possible — or, as Sheikh Mudayris put it eloquently, to “cleanse our country from the filth of the Jews.”
