Shortly after Yasser Arafat passed from the scene last November, the Palestinian Authority reportedly ordered a halt to incitement against Israelis and Jews in the official Palestinian media.
It was also reported that the new Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, had met with the head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Authority and asked him to check all programs aired on state television to prevent the broadcast of the kind of inciting material Arafat had allowed for years.
Now Yediot Ahronot reports that Palestinian TV broadcast a sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Mudairis in which he called Jews “a spreading cancer.”
“The Jews are the cancer spreading all over the world…the Jews are responsible for all wars and conflicts,” …Mudairis said Friday during a sermon from his Gaza Mosque in the presence of uniformed Palestinian police.
“Do not ask what Germany did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to Germany,” he went on to say. “True the Germans killed and burnt Jews, but the Jews exaggerate the numbers to gain propaganda advantages and sympathy.”
What will Abbas do now? Will any of the hundreds of political groups which routinely denounce Israel join the Simon Wiesenthal Center in demanding Abbas fire the head of Palestinian TV? And will the AUT call for a boycott of Palestinian professors who refuse to denounce Sheikh Mudairis’s poisonous words?
