Turkish Webinar Wages Anti-Israel Jihad (Part One)



“All Arabs, all Muslims come to Jerusalem, come as conquerors, like Prophet Muhammad conquered Jerusalem on the night of al-Isra,” stated Palestinian Catholic priest Manuel Musallam from Beirut via translation during a June 18 webinar. His radical remarks during the opening session of the June 18-23 second annual Palestine Conference at Istanbul Zaim University’s Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) characterized CIGA’s rabid anti-Israel nature.

This conference on “Challenging Apartheid in Palestine: Reclaiming the Narrative, Formulating A Vision” achieved considerable notoriety merely due to CIGA’s founder, Sami Al-Arian. A federal court convicted this Palestinian-American former University of South Florida computer science professor in 2006 for supporting the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which ultimately led to his deportation to Turkey in 2015. At CIGA Al-Arian has continued his long-established record of demonizing and calling for Israel’s destruction, which, as the conference showed, numerous academics in America and abroad zealously promote.

Correspondingly, Musallam is a decades-long Fatah activist and former head of the Department for the Christians in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Foreign Office. The invaluable pro-Israel website Elder of Ziyon has called him the “ultimate dhimmi.” He has previously stated that “politically I am a Palestinian Muslim.”

Musallam in his address emphasized pan-Arab solidarity, in which Arab Christians, contrary to the reality of incessant persecution by a Muslim Arab majority, lived as brothers with their Muslim neighbors. “Dear Jerusalem, resistance steadfast, Jerusalem!” he proclaimed, “I once see you ascending to the heavens holding a Quran in your right arm and a Bible in your left arm,” namely the hand Muslims traditionally consider to be dirty. “We are Arabs,” who are “fighting and struggling for the Arab-Islamic-Christian civilization,” which is “my identity and my people and my national root.”

By contrast, Israel for Musallam was a threat to Jerusalem, the ancient Jewish capital. “I am the Jerusalem of Arabs and Muslims and whoever calls me the Jerusalem of Israel shall be ashamed,” he said. “I am a city of God, where those who dispute me are those who want to shed blood, who are seculars, who are Zionists, who try to defile me with their atheist, unjust culture,” he added, implying that Israel is less pure than the Arabs. “Infidelity, Freemasonism, atheism, and Zionism all of them are trying very hard to rip me off my sanctity and to wipe away the footprints of all the prophets that passed through me,” he claimed in conspiratorial tones. Meanwhile he absurdly stated that the “Quran and the Bible are being banned.”

Musallam’s fellow panelists cast Israel in the most ominous of terms. Moderating the panel, CIGA Research Fellow Ubeyd Ruff mentioned his daughter’s great-grandfather from the village of Hamama, “which was stolen from him in 1948” during Israel’s independence war. “We will go back,” he asserted, even though the village no longer exists since its inhabitants fled when an invading Egyptian army retreated before an Israeli attack.

Palestine Land Society President Salman Abu Sitta said that “Israel was the aggressor” in 1948 during its desperate fight for survival as five armies from neighboring Arab states sought to destroy Israel at birth. Israel then lost over 6,000 dead, almost one percent of its population of 650,000 Jews, but he with his usual disdain for the truth blathered about “settlers from Poland and Russia” supposedly giving Israel an enormous advantage. “Many were veterans of World War II,” he said, but many Jews who fought for Israeli independence were also Holocaust survivors.

Other statements from Abu Sitta were equally absurd, including his baseless accusation that Israel is inflicting a “genocide” in the Gaza Strip, which even critics of Israel have rejected. He claimed that Palestinians globally numbered “40 million people.” He stated that “Arab Jews” after Israel’s independence “lost their wealth in Baghdad and Cairo, in order to be Zionists,” suggesting a voluntary choice. Yet Arab/Muslim state repression effectively expelled Mizrachi Jewish populations.

Abu Sitta equally baselessly envisioned a “free and democratic Palestine” while his fellow panelist Al-Arian invoked discredited apartheid tropes against Israel. He referenced “Jewish-only colonies” in the disputed territories Israel won in the 1967 Six Day War, when in fact Israeli communities are open to all Israeli citizens, whether Arab or Jew. His reference to “separate roads for Israeli citizens” also ignored the Palestinian terrorism concerns that have led to temporary Israeli restrictions on Palestinian vehicular traffic.

Such terrorism received shocking glorification from Palestinian writer and CIGA senior research fellow Ramzy Baroud during the conference’s second session on June 19. The panelists addressed “The Reality of Occupation and Meaning of Resistance,” with Baroud presenting on “Political Prisoners: Recounting the Human Toll.” Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails for terrorism offenses “are not and never were terrorists,” he said.

These prisoners, such as Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah mastermind behind at least five terrorist murders, have clearly demonstrated bloodthirstiness, yet Baroud marveled at Western media reports on these prisoners. There is an “immediate kind of knee-jerk reaction of them being terrorists,” he said. They are “immediately classified within that ever-convenient category of Israel’s security, since Israel’s has the right to defend itself.”

Contrastingly, Baroud lauded these Palestinian prisoners. They “stand at the heart of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation. Actually, even more than that. They are the center and the core of that struggle, they are the leaders of the Palestinian people,” he said. Perhaps thinking of Barghouti’s disturbing popularity among Palestinians, he said that these prisoners’ “own actions” and “massive support they enjoy among ordinary Palestinians…have elected them to be the true leaders of Palestine.”

According to the “incredible antifascist” Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist leader who died in 1937 in prison under dictator Benito Mussolini, these prisoners are “organic intellectuals,” Baroud said. “They are indeed the true beating heart of the grassroots representation of the Palestinian people.” Thus “Hamas is not the enemy, Fatah is not the enemy, Islamic Jihad is not the enemy. The enemy is actually Israel and the colonization and apartheid and racism of Israel.”

American lawyer Amith Gupta from the Coalition for Civil Freedoms even termed Hamas a “so-called terrorist organization” in his presentation on “The Forgotten Prisoners: The Targeting Palestinian Activism in the US.” He dismissed the largest conviction in American history for terrorism financing in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial as “government propaganda.” He meanwhile condemned the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as a “FBI collaboration organization.”

Such apologies and praise for terrorism are extreme, but the CIGA conference was just beginning in these two sessions. Even more radicalism would follow over the conference’s course, as a forthcoming article will document.