In his address, Al-Ghazzawi (whose name means “from Gaza”) urges the Palestinians to participate in the war against “the unbelievers, headed by the U.S., Europe and Iran” who are attacking Islam. He stresses that they must begin by fighting the Jews, who are their nearest enemies.–¦
“We say to our sheikh, Shaker [Al-‘Absi], as well as to Osama [bin Laden], Ayman [Al-Zawahiri] and Abu Omar [Al-Baghdadi]: ‘Set forth with Allah’s blessing and fight — and we shall fight at your side. Oh Muslims [worldwide] and people of Gaza… you are our support, and through you we shall receive help from Allah… Borders should not come between us… Our God is one, our religion is one, and our enemy is one…” — from this MEMRI translation
It is precisely this truth — the real nature of the war on Israel, which is simply a Lesser Jihad — that the Arabs have tried to conceal from the Western world, even as they have never made much of a secret about it among themselves.
After the Six-Day War, the local Arabs — not those within Israel as defined by the 1949 Armistice Lines (who continued to simply be called “Arabs”) — but those Arabs who were in the territories won by Israel in a war of self-defense, in Gaza, and in Judea and Samaria (which had been carefully renamed by Jordanian Arabs, in the late 1940s, as “the West Bank” [of the Jordan River] — a most peculiar designation for such an ear-shaped area), carefully renamed themselves as the “Palestinian people.” And the Arabs collectively repackaged their refusal to contemplate the existence of the State of Israel as a “nationalist struggle.” But what has always been behind it is the fact that Islam inculcates the need to retake any inch or dunam of land that has ever been under Muslim control, no matter how tiny that land area may be, or how inoffensive its current Infidel possessors.
It is amusing to go back and see how, in all the U.N. debates in 1947 and 1948 and 1949, not a single Arab diplomat ever uses the phrase “Palestinian people.” It is amusing to see that not a single Egyptian used the phrase during the Suez Campaign and its heedless aftermath. It is amusing to compare what the Arabs kept saying to their fellow Arabs, and what they would say, without any fear of being caught out, to the Western press, and Western officials, and Western peace-processors galore, each more innocent of Islam than the next, from late 1967 on.
And of course, successive Israeli governments have been unwilling or unable to properly recognize the nature of the struggle against Israel. They have been unwilling to admit, and therefore to gird their own people for endless war, a war that can be, not “won” but at least not “lost” and managed, just as the Americans managed the war with Soviet expansionists, until it was the Soviet Union that collapsed in upon itself. And while the same promptings emerge again in the Kremlin, with some of the same human types as could be found there before, Russia’s strength comes almost entirely from possession of oil and gas resources, and its control of satellite states has ended, and its military threat has greatly lessened.
Over the years many “Palestinian” Arab leaders would utter the truth about the war on Israel. Zuheir Mohsen did it, explaining that the whole business with the “Palestinian People” was useful fiction. Yassir Arafat did it, all the time, perhaps most boldly in Johannesburg, just a few weeks after he had signed the Oslo Accords. To a Muslim audience, by way of explanation, he smilingly mentioned Muhammad’s treaty with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya — meaning, of course, that just as Muhammad broke that agreement and subsequently attacked the Meccans in 629 A.D., so he, Yassir Arafat — never fear — would be doing the same kind of thing. A week or two ago it was the Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar, denying that there was ever such a place as “Palestine” separate from the great “Arab nation.” Of course hardly anyone in the Western press bothered to discuss the significance of that highly significant remark. How could they, after all? It would require people to be more than mere reporters. It would require them to know something, and especially, something about Islam.
That would be unfair. That would be too taxing.