Another Palestinian cleric conducted a blatantly anti-Semitic sermon and incited violence against Jews, the Middle East Monitoring Research Service (MEMRI) reports.
Preaching from al-Aqsa Mosque, Sheikh Khaled Al-Maghrabi cited an infamous verse, or hadith, in the Qu'ran which encourages killing Jews.
"...we know, from the hadith of the Prophet Muhammad, that at the End of Time, there will be a war between us and the Israelites in the Holy Land. In that war, the trees sand stones will speak. They will say: 'Oh Muslim, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!," Al-Maghrabi said during a sermon posted on the Internet on June 16 and translated by MEMRI.
Al-Maghrabi is part of the Palestinian Authority's Waqf, or religious authority, and receives government pay. Last month, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called on PA President Mahmoud Abbas to denounce separate remarks by al-Maghrabi and terminate his pay. In a lecture posted online, al-Maghrabi repeated the "blood libel" that Jews use the blood of children to make matzoh.
In the June sermon, he describes how "the Koran says that Allah is angry with them [the Jews], and that He cursed them and transformed them into apes and pigs ... the Koran exposes their true nature."
He also advised the "Israelites" to "get out of the occupied Holy Land" if they do not convert to Islam.
"Your return and presence in this land is a violation of Allah's command. For this violation, there will be a terrible and painful punishment by Allah. There will be destruction."
This latest radical sermon is just one example of many featuring extremist Palestinian clerics delivering anti-Semitic lectures that incite violence against Jews and Israelis.
It remains to be seen whether the U.S. administration will apply sufficient pressure on the Palestinian Authority to crackdown on these recurring extremist sermons. A recently released State Department report on terrorism worldwide minimizes official Palestinian incitement to violence against Israel and entirely omits any reference to Palestinian glorification of terrorists.
The report actually praises the PA for taking "significant steps to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank that fall under its control do not create content that leads to incitement to violence." The report acknowledges that "some instances of inciting taking place via official media" still occur, listing only three examples. However, the report diminishes the fact that incitement to violence is a systematic and institutionalized PA phenomenon.
The State Department assessment also ignores the direct participation of senior PA officials in praising terrorists and inciting violence against Israelis and Jews.
Click here for an Investigative Project on Terrorism comprehensive outline of Palestinian violent incitement focused only on incidents last fall.