In Human Events this morning I discuss the increasing and outlandish tendency of Islamic supremacists to blame the Zionists for their own jihad attacks:
Did you know that Israeli Mossad agents murdered 22 people and wounded 80 more at the Coptic Christian Church of Saints George and Peter in Alexandria, Egypt, on New Year”s Eve? Neither did I. But all around the Islamic world, that’s the story being told — in yet another instance of Muslim denial of jihadist violence, and displacement of responsibility upon their favorite scapegoat, the Jews.
Iran’s PressTV, an official organ of the Islamic Republic, claimed in an unsigned editorial that “the fresh plot by terrorists to target churches is an organized Zionist scenario aimed at creating a rift between Muslims and Christians.” Lebanese Shi’ite leader Sheikh Abdel Amir Kabalan struck a tone so similar as to give the impression that a set of talking points were being circulated: “This terrorist act bears the fingerprints of Zionists who keep on targeting religious sites and are working to . . . sow discord between Muslims and Christians.”
Nor did this paranoid and preposterous claim circulate only among Shi’ites. A Saudi Sheikh, Salman al-Awda, a member of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s International Union for Muslim Scholars, made the same assertion about other recent jihad attacks against Christians in the Middle East: “These are tools in the hands of the Zionists, Israelis, Europeans, and Orientals, with the goal of damaging Islam.” An Islamic cleric in Egypt itself, Abu Omar (Osama Hasan Mustafa Nasr), added in American involvement, claiming that “Israel’s Mossad and the CIA are behind the attack in Alexandria.”
Politicians jumped in as well. A political party in Lebanon, the Lebanese Popular Congress, opined that “what happened in Egypt, and what is happening in Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, and Lebanon, and what will happen in other Arab-Islamic countries, is all occurring within the framework of this hellish plot, whose components were carefully crafted in the Zionist-American Greater Middle East project.” Former Lebanese Defense Minister Abd-al-Rahim Murad said the attack on the church in Egypt constituted “clear evidence of Zionist-Western attempts to target the national fabric of Egypt.”…