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“The Muslim embraces death,” the Mufti of Jerusalem told a New Yorker reporter twenty years ago. “Look at the society of the Israelis. It is a selfish society that loves life. These are not people who are eager to die for their country and their God. The Jews will leave this land rather than die, but the Muslim is happy to die.”
Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri is no longer the mufti, one of the successors to ‘Hitler’s mufti’, but he is still a preacher at the Al Aqsa settler mosque planted on the Temple Mount by the Islamic colonists and invaders, and he now faces a court inquiry in Israel over his support for terrorism.
But according to Sabri’s defense team, it’s just “religious speech”.
Counterterrorism researchers in Israel have described Sabri as “a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood” and “an official member of Hamas’s “Coalition of Charity” committee” that raised funds for Islamic terrorist attacks. In his ‘sermon’ in the Al Aqsa occupation mosque, Sabri had eulogized “the Martyr Ismail Haniyeh”: the former Hamas leader he had reportedly taken part in an Iranian conference with, leading to a temporary ban on his presence at the occupying site.
There’s certainly no question that Sabri is also one of the leaders of Muslims in Israel. He’s the head of the Supreme Muslim Council in Jerusalem governing Islamic affairs. He’s also on record as praising Islamic terrorism.
Sabri had taken part in a conference with the now deceased leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah and according to the indictment can be seen on video praising the ISIS terrorist attack around Tel Aviv bars that killed 3 people and wounded 6, reportedly describing the terrorist as a “torch that lights our way”, as well as another terrorist who killed a soldier and shot an 18-year-old woman.
Sabri argued that in Islam, “the word ‘martyr’ has a sublime meaning, a dignified meaning, a national meaning, that is not found in other religions. They are alive, but we as humans do not feel it. He is in Paradise, Allah willing, because the angels are the ones who welcome him.”
“The Western media warns and forbids the Arab media to talk about martyrs and jihad, it is forbidden to talk about jihad… All the talk is about resistance in general, without mentioning the word martyr or the qualities of a martyr, why? Because if all people knew how the status of a martyr is, then all people would turn to martyrdom in order to earn this divine generosity, this divine grace, this sublime status,” the sheikh reportedly said.
“Every Palestinian is, in fact, in a state of Jihad,” Sabri had previously told an Egyptian paper, while urging a continuation of the ‘Intifada’, hailing especially the ‘child martyrs’, claiming that “the younger the martyr – the greater and the more I respect him” and described having “talked to a young man” who supposedly told the Islamic preacher of his longing for the 72 virgins, “I want to marry the black-eyed women of heaven.’ The next day he became a martyr. I am sure his mother was filled with joy about his heavenly marriage.”
Sabri had previously threatened that Jewish prayer at the site of the former Temple would lead to mass murder. “Jewish prayer at Al-Aqsa will prompt massacres the magnitude of which only Allah knows,” he had warned. “Harm to Al-Aqsa will prompt massacres and rivers of blood.”
But according to Sabri’s lawyers, all of the things that he has been accused of is “legitimate religious speech protected by law”.
There’s no question that Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri’s speech is religious in the sense that it’s Islamic. Nothing he has said at all deviates from the sentiments of Islam when it comes to violence against non-Muslims. The real question then is whether religious calls to religious violence are a protected form of speech.
While Sabri’s case is taking place in Israel, the case has larger implications globally, including in the United States and Europe where Islamic religious leaders, sheikhs and imams, have frequently been caught calling for violence in sermons at their mosques, with no consequences.
The United States has hesitated to take any action against mosque preachers who call for the destruction of America even when they’re non-citizens. Some European nations have tentatively considered expelling foreign imams, but have rarely followed through.
What is at stake in Sheikh Sabri’s case is the larger question of the legal status of Islam.
Politicians around the world have avoided the question by arguing that calls for violence represent a ‘misunderstanding’ of Islam or a fringe movement that is ‘un-Islamic’. They insist, all theological evidence to the contrary, that Islam is a “religion of peace”. And if Islam is a religion of peace, then there’s certainly no reason to think that Islamic speech can be linked to violence.
Yet Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri is indisputably an Islamic religious leader and his speech is indisputably violent. Israeli authorities, like their western counterparts, have tried to avoid dealing with the problem. They have slapped on temporary bans and partial restrictions as part of the same failed theory that they used to try and manage Hamas and Gaza before Oct 7.
It was only after the horrors of Oct 7 that the highly flawed notion that a system of incentives and restrictions could be used to avert Islamic terrorism finally fell apart. At least for a time.
But Israeli officials have had less appetite for dealing with Islamic terrorist activity in Jerusalem and the case against Sabri only came about because of the dedicated work of pro-Israel groups like LAVI inside the country that did the research, mobilized the information and filed complaint after complaint in an effort to finally bring Sheikh Ekrima Sa’id Sabri to justice.
The Israeli government is by no means prepared to concede that Islam and Islamic terrorism are interlinked, then again no government seems to be ready to admit that, but Sabri’s defense that his terrorist propaganda was “religious speech” dares the government and all of us to confront the religious nature of the genocidal Islamic campaign being waged against Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and all the rest of the entirety of the human race.
