In FrontPage for Friday I discuss the recent endorsement of genocide by a Muslim student at UCSD:
UC-San Diego student Jumanah Imad Albahri last week, under questioning from David Horowitz, refused to condemn Hamas and Hizballah and endorsed a genocidal statement by Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Many were shocked. Albahri’s statement is being treated as a singular utterance, a lapse that has nothing to do with the Muslim Students Association of which she is a part, and certainly not with Islam as a whole.
Unfortunately, Albahri’s support for genocide of the Jews doesn’t reveal that she is a closet Nazi, but that she is an entirely mainstream Muslim. Genocidal statements are painfully common from Muslim leaders today. On January 29, Palestinian Authority TV, which is controlled by the ostensibly moderate Fatah faction of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, broadcast a Friday mosque sermon containing this reference to the notorious genocidal hadith in which Muhammad says that the end times would not come until Muslims started murdering Jews: “The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them, until the tree and the stone will speak and say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah”‘ — the tree and the stone will not say, ‘Oh Arab,’ they will say, ‘Oh Muslim.’ And they will not say, ‘Where are the millions?’ and will not say, ‘Where is the Arab nation?’ Rather, they will say, ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah — there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews. Thus, this land will be liberated only by means of Jihad.”
In the original hadith, Muhammad says that “the last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews” (Sahih Muslim 6985).
If the “last hour” will not come until Muslims start murdering Jews wholesale, then what’s to prevent a pious young lady like Jumanah Imad Albahri from believing that speaking approvingly of the mass-murder of Jews, as Nasrallah did, is a holy and pious act?
Clearly other Muslims do. On January 12, a top Iranian official, Mohammad Hassan Rahimian, declared on Al-Manar TV: “We have manufactured missiles that allow us, when necessary, to replace Israel in its entirety with a big holocaust.” And on December 29, 2009, Muhammad Hussein Yaaqub, an Islamic cleric, dashed hopes for the usefulness of interfaith discussions when he said this on Egypt’s Al-Nas TV: “The Jews are our enemies. Allah will annihilate them at our hands. This is something we know for certain. We know this for certain – not because I say so, but because Allah said so. ‘You shall find that the people strongest in enmity to the believers are the Jews and the polytheists.'”
Yaaqub was quoting from the Qur’an (5:82).