A Mufti's Unending Vitriol 

By Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe 
8/23/2001 

In the summer of 1997, a young Israeli art student named Tatiana 
Susskin drew a caricature portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a 
pig and tacked up copies of it on Arab storefronts in Hebron. 
She could hardly have devised a more inflammatory insult. The 
crude leaflets provoked riots and calls for vengeance, not only 
in Hebron but in much of the Muslim world. 

Far from defending Susskin, leading Israelis rushed to condemn her. 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned the Arab mayor of Hebron 
''to express not only my personal revulsion, but the revulsion of 
the entire people of Israel ... against this frontal attack on 
one of the world's great religions.'' One of the country's two 
chief rabbis went to Hebron to apologize in person to the city's 
senior Muslim cleric. 

Susskin was arrested by the Israeli authorities, put on trial, 
and convicted in Jerusalem District Court of (among other charges) 
committing a racist act, attempted vandalism, and attempting to 
give religious offense. Judge Zvi Segal sentenced her to two years 
in prison, calling her deed a ''revolting, degenerate act which 
offended the feelings of Moslems in Israel and the entire world.'' 
Her appeal was rejected and she spent 16 months behind bars 
before being released on parole. 

For Americans used to the protection of the Bill of Rights, so 
ferocious a reaction to some juvenile graffiti is unthinkable. 
But while Israel is not bound by the First Amendment, it is 
bound by the terms of its accords with the Palestinian Authority. 
Article XXII of the 1995 Oslo 2 agreement, for example, obliges 
the parties to ''abstain from incitement, including hostile 
propaganda, against each other'' and to ''take legal measures 
to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups, or 
individuals within their jurisdiction.'' 

As the Susskin affair suggests, Israel has been vigilant in 
suppressing and punishing such incitement. Have the Palestinians? 

Consider the case of Ikrama Sabri. In July 1997, just a few days 
after Susskin's leaflets went up in Hebron, Sabri called openly 
for violence against Israeli Jews - ''colonialist settlers who 
are sons of monkeys and pigs.'' He beseeched Allah to ''take 
revenge'' on them (and, for good measure, to ''destroy America, 
for she is ruled by Zionist Jews''). 

Unlike Susskin, a lone activist with no public platform or 
official position, Sabri is a Palestinian of considerable 
influence: He is the mufti of Jerusalem, chosen by Yasser Arafat 
to be the city's senior Islamic religious figure. His sermons 
are attended by thousands of worshipers and broadcast on 
Palestinian radio. There can hardly be any doubt about the 
Palestinian Authority's obligation to silence Sabri's hateful 
rhetoric. 

But Sabri was not silenced in the summer of 1997. Nor was he 
silenced the following March, when he praised suicide bombings 
as ''a response to the occupation'' and a ''legitimate'' means 
of confronting Israel. Nor was he silenced - let alone prosecuted 
and imprisoned - in March 2000, when he mocked Jewish deaths in 
the Holocaust. ''Six million Jews dead? No way, they were much 
fewer,'' Sabri sneered. ''Let's stop with this fairy tale.'' 

Last summer, the mufti whipped up a frenzy over the prospect of 
Jews praying on the Temple Mount. Any ''Jewish prayer,'' he 
threatened, would mean ''massacres the magnitude of which only 
Allah knows ... massacres and rivers of blood.'' The reaction 
of the Palestinian Authority? It published Sabri's words in 
Al Hayat Al Jadidah, the official Palestinian newspaper. 

His vitriol has been unending. ''I am filled with rage toward 
the Jews,'' he spat in October. ''They are the most cowardly 
creatures Allah ever created.'' In June came another paean to 
suicide bombers: ''Oh, Muslims,'' he preached, ''attack and you 
will gain one of two blessings: either victory or martyrdom.... 
The Muslim loves death and martyrdom.'' One week later, an Arab 
bomber murdered 21 young Israelis outside a disco in Tel Aviv. 

The difference between Israel's treatment of Susskin and the 
Palestinian Authority's treatment of Sabri is glaring but 
unsurprising. After all, there is virtually no provision of the 
peace accords that the Palestinians have not violated; it hardly 
comes as news that their promise to crack down on incitement 
has not been kept either. 

No, the key point is this: Susskin was an exception, Sabri is 
the rule. The mufti's blind hatred of Jews is echoed over and 
over, in every Palestinian venue and medium. Turn on the TV - 
a sheik offers ''blessings to whoever saved a bullet to put 
in a Jew's head.'' Open the mail - a letter from Arafat praises 
the Tel Aviv disco terrorist as a ''model of manhood and 
sacrifice.'' Send a child to one of the Palestinian Authority's 
summer camps and he learns that murdering Jews will assure him 
a place in heaven. Click on the web site of Arafat's PLO 
faction (www.fateh.net) and read how the killing must continue 
until ''the Zionist state is demolished.'' 

Daily, hourly, constantly, Palestinians are exhorted to loathe 
Jews and to glorify those who kill them. Nine years into the 
''peace process,'' their hatred is greater than ever. Is it 
any wonder the victims keep dying?