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Raed Salah, Who Spread Islamism among Arab Israelis, Goes to Jail

March 24 2020

Last month, an Israeli court sentenced the jihadist leader Raed Salah to 28 months in prison for his role in inciting the 2017 terrorist attack on the Temple Mount, in which his followers murdered two Druze police officers. Born in 1954, Salah—whose father and two brothers served in the Israeli police—was part of a wave of Arabs who were drawn into the Muslim Brotherhood, and has himself done as much as anyone to promote its ideology among his fellow Arab citizens of the Jewish state. Shaul Bartal explains:

After the Six-Day War, young Israeli Arab Muslims were able to attend religious institutions in the West Bank that were under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood. Salah . . . became part of the original nucleus of the Islamist cell at Hebron College (now Hebron University), which eventually turned pro-Hamas. Another member of that cell was Salah al-Aruri, the founder of Hamas’s military wing and now deputy head of its political bureau.

Salah was arrested for the first time in 1981 for joining [an] organization set up by Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish [that later became] the Islamic Movement in Israel. [In the 1990s] he began to formulate his worldview, which holds that Muslims in Israel must detach completely from governmental institutions and that the Islamic Movement must not take part in elections to the Knesset. That stance led to a division of the Islamic Movement into the Southern Branch, headed by Sheikh Darwish, and the more radical Northern Branch, led by Salah.

Salah’s speeches are laced with anti-Semitism, and for that reason he was barred from entering Britain in 2012, although he was granted entry after an appeal. His message contains several consistent themes: the Jews aim to destroy the al-Aqsa Mosque and Muslims are duty-bound to defend it by any means necessary; the struggle between Jews and Muslims is an eternal one that appears in the Quran; the Palestinian nakba is comparable to the Holocaust; and “martyrs” [i.e. those who die committing terrorist attacks], are praiseworthy and will only multiply on the path of jihad until victory.

Salah later founded the Murabitun and Murabitat, two groups responsible for constant agitation and harassment of Jews on the Temple Mount, and his organization maintains close and friendly ties with Hamas.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Hamas, Islamic Movement, Israeli Arabs, Temple Mount, Terrorism

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic