Claims of Jewish control of the media and American politics and alleged war-mongering by Israel and America dominated speeches Friday at an Iranian-inspired rally in Washington, D.C.
"If you love America, you love lying, you love rape, you love murder, you love killing," said Abdul Alim Musa, imam of Washington D.C.'s Masjid Al-Islam and head of a separatist movement called As-Sabiqun. "And then, the Zionist, diabolical, sinister Israeli. Nobody in history, they cry about some Holocaust, we had five or ten people get killed."
Similar rallies were held in New York, Chicago, Detroit and other cities. The rallies were promoted by American University's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, and through personal Twitter posts by Cyrus McGoldrick, advocacy director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) New York chapter.
Resolutions adapted by Quds Day organizers endorse Hamas rule and call for a "one-state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The "one-state" idea is a non-violent means of eliminating Israel, because the greater number of Palestinians would eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. "We support a peaceful dismantling of the Zionist State and a referendum with participation from the Christians, Jews and Muslims within the present day borders of the Zionist State, as well as participation from Palestinians within the occupied territories and refugee camps scattered across the region in deciding their fate," a resolution reads.
The resolutions dismiss Palestinian terrorism as "side issues."
The crowd at Washington's Dupont Circle was reminded that Quds Day is the creation of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used the day to call for Israel's elimination, calling it "a cancerous tumor."
"Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime," Ahmadinejad said.
Ahmadinejad's statements were condemned as "outrageous and hateful" in a rebuke from European Union foreign affairs director Catherine Ashton. "Israel's right to exist must not be called into question," she said.
But Ahmadinejad made similar statements earlier this month, blaming 400 years of problems on "the horrendous Zionist clan" dominating global politics, media and economics. "Any freedom lover and justice seeker in the world must do its best for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the path for the establishment of justice and freedom in the world," he said.
Iran's Lebanese-based terrorist proxy issued more specific threats Friday, boasting the capability to inflict mass casualties on Israeli civilians.
"Hitting these targets with a small number of rockets will turn ... the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zionists to real hell, and we can talk about tens of thousands of dead," said Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
Unlike previous Quds Day rallies in Washington, this year's event featured softer rhetoric and no Hizballah flags. But speakers still pushed anti-Semitic theories and strident anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric. A compilation of examples appears below.
"The reality is in this country, the Zionist thugs who manipulate politics and the media as well, they often want us to hide to keep the message of support for the Palestinian people only off to the side," said Eugene Puryear of the leftist ANSWER Coalition. "And I think it's very important to note that we will not hide anymore."
Though Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria continues to slaughter civilians, no speaker mentioned the plight of Syrian citizens. Rather, it is Israel that is responsible for "one of the greatest crimes going on in the world today," Puryear said. "It is "the most divisive force, really one of the most divisive force (sic), along with the U.S. imperialist government, who are their allies, and the entire world, in sowing strife and destruction, everywhere they go."
American politics is held hostage by candidates to Jewish interests, said Code Pink's Medea Benjamin. She said there was no difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue or on whether to attack Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program. That's because "both of them [are] pandering for the votes of a very small minority of people in the United States and [are] really looking for money for their campaigns."
Mauri Saalakhan, a writer and conspiracy theorist, discussed a poster showing Muslims either imprisoned for terrorism-related convictions or killed in U.S. drone strikes to argue that "the devastation that is taking place in Muslim lands, in occupied Philistine, or as it is commonly known today – Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Pakistan and many of these other countries in the international community – It is also taking place here in America."
Defense attorney Lynn Stewart, who was convicted of helping her client, blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman send messages to other terrorists, is imprisoned "because she was willing to represent Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman a little too effectively," Saalakhan claimed. Abdel-Rahman is considered the spiritual leader behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was convicted in a subsequent plot to bomb New York City tunnels and landmarks.
Others on the poster include "Lady al-Qaida" Aafia Siddiqui, Palestinian Islamic Jihad board member Sami Al-Arian, Luqman Abdullah – a Detroit imam killed by FBI agents trying to arrest him after he opened fire first, blind, al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, and Ali al-Tamimi who was convicted of urging followers to fight American troops following 9/11.
But it was Musa who was the most explicit, placing Israel in a "triangle of terror" along with the United States and Saudi Arabia. Terrorism by al-Qaida and the Taliban are ruses, he said, called in "any time there is an internal need to subvert the Muslims" and to justify killing Muslims and destroying Islam.
Musa made similar comments Friday in an appearance on Press TV, Iran's English-language media outlet, discussing the "triangle of terror" and Israel's control over the global media. Press TV also did a feature report on Friday's rally.
Quds Day is a hate fest centered on a call to destroy an existing country. The speakers in Dupont Circle may have been more subtle than Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah, but their message, made clear in resolutions, was no less violent. It's not about Israeli policies. It is Israel's very existence that they want eliminated.