AJC Report Documents Arab Campaign to Destroy Israel

American Jewish Committee
Wednesday, 27 February 2002

In a report issued this week, the American Jewish Committee documents hate speech and threats against Israel, Jews and the West sounded across the Arab world, even during peace negotiations.

"The current violence cannot be understood without an appreciation of the intensity of hostility toward Israel and all things Jewish," states the AJC report, Intifada II: A Chronology of Words and Deeds, June 2000 – January 2002. "This violent hatred cannot be justified by a desire to create a Palestinian state, and, in fact, is counterproductive to that end in the extreme."

The full report, available at www.ajc.org, provides a portrait of the systemic hatred fostered by religious and political leaders, and the media, in Arab countries, from Egypt to Iraq, and in Iran, and also demonstrates, especially in the case of the Palestinian Authority, how this hatred is transformed into terrorism.

According to the AJC report, even as Israelis and Palestinians were discussing peace in June 2000 while preparing for Camp David II, an increasingly vehement campaign for Israel's destruction was launched in the Palestinian Authority, in the Arab world and in Iran.

The Qatari-based Arab satellite television channel "Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language news outlets repeatedly broadcast vicious and incendiary anti-Israel propaganda, often drawing on classic anti-Semitic sources, such as the Elders of the Protocols of Zion," states the report.

"Arab newspapers began a mantra, to be taken up by Yasser Arafat himself, that Jews have no religious affiliation with Israel," thereby advancing the widely-held myth in the Arab world that Jews have no connection to Jerusalem, to the Temple Mount, to the land of Israel.

"A chorus of voices in the Arab world claimed that Israel was a genocidal regime and Zionism the root cause of all problems," says the AJC report. In a TV interview just last month, the report says, Arafat expressed his hatred of Jews through the most extreme anti-Semitic slander to date. "Israeli occupation forces not only kill Palestinian children, but they also mutilate their bodies, and extract vital organs to use them as 'spare parts,'" Mr. Arafat told Al Jazeera.

The report also documents the Arab and Islamic terrorism campaign that began in earnest in September 2000, and continues to produce Israeli victims almost daily.

"Given the virulence of the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda to which many have been exposed, it is not surprising that terrorism against Israel has gained such widespread support," the AJC report concludes.

"If Muslim religious leaders implore their followers to 'have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country, fight them, wherever you are, wherever you meet them, kill them,' as did Dr. Ahmed Abu Halabiya in a sermon on the Palestinian Authority national TV station, we should not be surprised if his followers do so."

The report also includes a selection of quotes from the Arab world in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

"After the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many in the Muslim world were quick to deny unequivocally Muslim involvement and instead blame Israel and the Jews – willfully ignoring all evidence to the contrary," says the AJC report. "Such baseless allegations cannot be attributed to anti-Israel sentiment. They are, in fact, reminiscent of classic anti-Semitism, incorporating wild conspiracy theories in a dangerous worldview."

Those wild theories include absurd charges that the Mossad carried out the September 11 attacks, that those attacks were an attempt by the Israelis to overthrow the Bush government and that Jewish doctors killed sick Muslim children with poison.

For more information, or to contact American Jewish Committee, see their website at: www.ajc.org