Mendaciously and methodically, Qadhi elaborated why “any neutral observer” would reject the “illegitimate state of Israel.” His “biggest culprit” was British colonialism, which gave a Palestinian territory to Jewish “Europeans” who did not “have anything to do with it in recent history.” The “infamous” 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain recognized the moral case for reestablishing a Jewish homeland, was “very racist, superiorist [sic], nationalistic,” he said.
Britain’s subsequent post–World War I Palestine Mandate under the League of Nations was, Qadhi claimed, “rapacious.” During Zionist settlement in this period, “terrorist gangs are terrorizing Palestinian farmers, getting rid of them, by hook or by crook,” he stated. In fact, Zionist economic development stimulated Arab immigration and population growth in the Mandate territory.
Qadhi likewise claimed the United Nations’ 1947 proposal to partition the Palestine Mandate into an Arab and a Jewish state a raw deal. In the Palestine Mandate, he said, “by 1947, only 7 percent of the land was owned by people of the Zionist background, 93 percent is still in the hands of Arabs and Muslims.” This claim obfuscated that most land in the Palestine Mandate was not private property but state land subject to political settlements. No inherent injustice therefore marked the fact that the partition intended that 55 percent (including barren desert) “of the land will go to those who just recently migrated” into the new Jewish state.
The Arabs’ adamant rejection of the partition plan reflected their seething hostility that greeted Israel’s declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, just as Britain was dissolving the Palestine Mandate. Qadhi misstated this basic historical fact as in “August of 1948, the state of Israel declares its inauguration.” The following day, the armies of five Arab states invaded the Palestine Mandate and joined with Arab paramilitaries in the Palestine Mandate already fighting in a vain effort to crush the newborn state.
Fighting for its survival, Israel’s fledgling population of 650,000 Jews lost over 6,000 dead, almost 1 percent of the total population, but Qadhi dishonestly portrayed this desperate struggle as one of Jewish bloodlust and aggression. Relying on the “most significant historian in this regard,” the debunked Israeli New Historian Ilan Pappé, Qadhi said of modern Israel’s first citizens that the “day they are born, they go to war, and they conquer more than 80 percent” of the former Palestine Mandate.
This “planned and calculated offensive” was “against who? Against armies, against the standing trained soldiers? No. Against farmers and peasants … who don’t have weapons,” Qadhi lied. Peddling falsehoods, he claimed Israelis, “armed to the teeth,” would “immediately force almost a million people to flee” and “massacre thousands of people” at places like Deir Yassin on Jerusalem’s outskirts. In truth, Arab disinformation in 1948 about this entirely fictional Israeli massacre backfired and accelerated Arabs’ flight after their leaders encouraged civilians to clear combat zones in order to facilitate an anticipated swift Arab victory.
The 1967 Six-Day War was for Qadhi another example of Zionist deceit. Here Israel’s “Zionist apartheid regime” would “launch yet another attack, yet another war,” he said of a conflict in which Israel conducted what is often cited as the model for preemptive self-defense. For confirmation of his apartheid smear, he cited the anti-Israel “Desmond Tutu, the senior-most bishop of the Catholic faith in Africa,” who is in fact a retired South African Anglican archbishop.
“No government on Earth treats other people the way that Israel treats its Palestinians” as “subhuman,” Qadhi asserted. “The largest open-air prison in the world, over two million people, the highest concentration of human beings on Earth, is in Gaza,” he claimed. This ignored both Hamas’s central role in Palestinian suffering and the fact that the population density of other, far more prosperous urban areas like Macau or Monaco is just as high or higher.
University of California-Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian doubled down on Qadhi’s flights of fancy. Arabs in what was once the Palestine Mandate territory have multiplied prodigiously since the beginning of Zionism, yet he used Holocaust inversion to claim that Palestinians face Zionist “settler-colonial genocide.” In this context, he said, “when the Zionists look at a Palestinian, he is looking at a subhuman person.”
Bazian debased the lexicon for crimes against humanity by introducing the absurd term “epistemic genocide” in the “way of knowing.” “All of us today without exception, maybe some few people here and there, are looking at the world through a European lens,” he said, as if the idea of Eurocentrism were not itself a Western construct. For example, “to separate church and state” is a “European framing,” he claimed, without exploring whether this separation benefits all people, whether in India or Italy.
Israeli radical son Miko Peled took the conference over the top in a final presentation, stating to applause that “Zionism is a racist ideology.” He continued, “Israel is an apartheid, racist, violent regime that has taken over Palestine,” meaning “from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea,” whose leaders “are all violent, racist lunatics.” He marveled that American politicians like President Joe Biden are proud Zionists. “What else is he proud of? Being a pedophile?,” Peled mocked.
Qadhi claims to have rejected many of his hardline Islamist beliefs. Yet his EPIC day of Israel-demonizing diatribes demonstrated that he retains many of his Salafist beliefs — an impression strengthened by his appearance with Bazian and Peled. Such open displays of bigotry evince the moral rot in some of America’s leading universities and sectarian institutions. Taxpayers, legislators, donors, and trustees should end their support for organizations in which bellicose propaganda is not merely tolerated but expected and rewarded.
Andrew E. Harrod is a Campus Watch Fellow, freelance researcher, and writer who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a J.D. from George Washington University Law School. He is a fellow with the Lawfare Project. Follow him on Twitter at @AEHarrod. This article is cross-posted with the author’s permission from The American Spectator.
PRCS says
“For example, “to separate church and state” is a “European framing,” he [Qadhi] claimed, without exploring whether this separation benefits all people, whether in India or Italy.”
Well, as one of Allah’s best slaves, of course not.
gravenimage says
So true, PRCS.
mortimer says
To PRCS … when the Ottomans lost the region, their title to the lands of Greater Syria were EXTINGUISHED.
The land DID NOT automatically transfer to a group of Muslims called ‘Palestinians’ from the Ottoman Turks. It passed to the League of Nations.
The League of Nations’ successor bequeathed the land to the State of Israel.
PRCS says
There’s a hole in his narrative.
mortimer says
Yasir Qadhi will never live down his exposure of the HOLES IN THE NARRATIVE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Q8W7ZZaE9s
Oy! You’re finished!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LknbK8fkAkM
Jillian says
Biden allowed these lying radical Islamist into our nation and now they’re spreading outright lies so they may conquer not just Israel, but the United States! Out with Islamic radical terrorists!
JohnTheRevelator says
If these so-called Muslim scholars take over our schools, universities, then expect kids to be completely brainwashed with Islamic propaganda, it’s already happened in far-left schools.
What’s bizarre is that people like Qadhi know what is the truth and yet they intentionally lie to demonize Israel. I guess if he was to admit 5 Arab armies attacked Israel, then it’d be clear Israel was the victim.
So what do we expect if we mix a population like this (Islam) with our own? I’ve debated plenty of Muslims in my time and basic discussions like this can easily turn into fights and worse.
Frankly we need to halt all immigration from Muslim and African nations where their cultures are backwards and more prone to being violent and illogical.
This crazy ‘multicultural’ Lefty experiment needs to end. I recall when immigration rules were far tougher back in the 80s…today they let anyone enter who can make it to our shores.
If you don’t have a shared culture, then you cannot get people to unite against a common enemy. Each community becomes segregated and they don’t care to help others unless they are directly affected.
Muslims however are united at least in the one goal of Islamifying western nations….so if we cannot mobilize a defense against them, then we will lose our freedom/democracy and turn into another hell-hole like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Somalia, etc.
It’s time for all of us who oppose Islam to unite under one banner and demand that it is banned and Muslims are deported. At least that’s one thing that unites most of us-since practically every culture has been a victim of Islam at one point.
Michael Copeland says
“Like all unbelievers and polytheists, Christians are filthy.
They are najusa (feces, urine) — a filthy impure dirty substance.”
Yasir Qadhi,
faculty member, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN.
http://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/
“Jews and Christians are filthy. Their lives and property can be taken
in jihad by the Muslims.”
Yaser Qadhi, Tennessee
GreekEmpress says
Just clicked on the link. No longer available—archived or suspended for violation of terms of service.
Too bad, so sad—NOT
saturnine says
Apparently The Muslim Issue was an anti-jihad site that was last updated in 2017 and deplatformed in early 2019. It probably wouldn’t have been removed if it were Qadhi’s site.
Limited archive here https://web.archive.org/web/20180224051150/https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/
gravenimage says
Thanks, saturnine. I had not realized that the Muslim Issue had been deplatformed–very disturbing.
GreekEmpress says
Thanks from me too saturnine—I mistakenly thought it was PRO-jihad
My bad—?
Michael Copeland says
“I was not allowed to question any established teaching of Salafi ideology. The Salafists consider any criticism of Islamic texts as redda (apostasy) punishable by death and eternal damnation.”
Tawfik Hamid
https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/The-development-of-a-jihadists-mind
gravenimage says
Yasir Qadhi: A ‘Reformist’ Muslim Cleric in Need of Reform
……………
Spot on from Andrew Harrod.
Yasir Qadhi has also whitewashed Jihad terror like the attacks in Paris by citing supposed “rising Islamophobia and the alienation and disenfranchisement” and blaming it on high unemployment rates among invading Musim “youth”.
https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/a-conversation-with-yasir-qadhi-on-paris-terrorism-and-islam-12105/
Damned thug.
He also trots out the usual canard that there is less Jihad terror in the US than in France and other parts of Europe, without noting that France has over eight times the percentage of Muslims that the US does.
He also hopes that we have forgotten 9/11, Ft. Hood, Orlando, and all the other Jihad terror attacks here.
mortimer says
The entire region of Greater Syria was ‘OWNED’ by OTTOMAN TURKEY before 1918 and it passed into the hands of the LEAGUE OF NATIONS when Turkey LOST WW I.
The region DID NOT pass into the ‘HANDS OF MUSLIMS AND PALESINIANS’ as Yasir Qadhi DECEITFULLY claims. The Palestinian Mandate remained under the League of Nations.
The MUSLIM land owners in Constantinople lost their titles to the land.
gravenimage says
Here is Yasir Qadhi trying to whitewash this genocidal Hadith:
“Uproar in Texas over anti-Semitic hadith”
https://www.regthink.org/en/articles/Texas
He claims that Muslims murdering all Jews is not antisemitic because only Europeans can be antisemitic.