File under cease-fire, Abu Mazen style:
Simon Wiesenthal Center Calls On PA President To Dismiss TV Chief After Live Broadcast of Antisemitic Sermon
"The Jews are the cancer spreading all over the world...the Jews are a virus like AIDS hitting humankind...Jews are responsible for all wars and conflicts....Do not ask what Germany did to the Jews but what the Jews did to Germany. True, the Germans killed and burned Jews but the Jews exaggerate the numbers to gain propaganda advantages and sympathy…. " - Sheikh Ibrahim Mudairis, May 13, 2005, Gaza
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to dismiss the head of Palestinian Television over the airing of a live sermon from a Gaza Mosque delivered by Sheikh Ibrahim Mudairis which was filled with antisemitic attacks and denials of the Holocaust.
During the sermon, in the presence of uniformed Palestinian Authority police, the Sheik also asserted that God has predetermined that the Jewish problem will be solved with the extermination of the Jews, and that God has also predetermined that Christian-Islam interactions will end with today's Christian countries under Islam.
"Even in the days of Arafat, we did not see such a blatant antisemitic and Holocaust-denying canard broadcast on Palestinian TV, whose current chief was personally appointed by Mahmoud Abbas," charged Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper, Dean and Associate Dean of the Wiesenthal Center .
"This attack comes just days before Mahmoud Abbas’ scheduled meeting with President Bush, and during the week which the civilized world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Is this genocidal sermon the kind of peace dividend that the people of Israel can look forward to? The first thing that Mahmoud Abbas should say to President Bush at the White House is that he fired the head of Palestinian Broadcasting and all those associated with the broadcast of this ‘big lie,’" Hier and Cooper concluded.
Center officials called on President Bush to raise this issue at the White House during his meeting with Mahmoud Abbas next week. They also called on the US government to link funding of Palestinian entities to their actions, not their promises. |
