Jordan’s army will destroy Israel and regain Jerusalem from the “killers of
prophets” – that was the message a Jordanian cleric delivered in a Friday sermon
on state TV, according to recently released video footage.
“The
[Jordanian] army is invincible. Its units are filled with people who pray, with
imams, and with people who memorized the Koran. This army will never be
defeated, Allah willing,” Imam Ghaleb Rabab’a said in footage translated and
released late last week by the Middle East Media Research
Institute.
“Jerusalem will be regained, Allah willing, by these modest
and pure hands, which hold the Koran high and recite it day and night,” Rabab’a
said in the March 23 sermon. “This is an army that bows before none but Allah.
Today, we must take pride in our country and its army, which descends from the
Prophet Muhammad.”
It remained unclear whether the sermon was delivered
from a state-run or private mosque.
Article 11 of the 1994 Israel-Jordan
peace treaty calls on both countries “to abstain from hostile or discriminatory
propaganda against each other, and to take all possible legal and administrative
measures to prevent the dissemination of such propaganda by any organization or
individual present in the territory of either party.”
Requests to the
Jordanian Embassy in Israel for comment went unanswered Sunday.
“The
arrogance of the Jews will be defeated, Allah willing,” Rabab’a said. “This
army, my brothers in faith, will shatter the might of Israel, Allah willing,
just as the might of the Crusaders and the Byzantines was shattered at Hittin,
at Yarmouk, Al-Qadisiyya [and] ‘Ain Jalut.”
Hittin, near Tiberias, was
the location of the 12th-Century battle in which Saladin’s Muslim army started
its final push of the Crusaders out of the Holy Land. ‘Ain Jalut, near today’s
Kibbutz Yizre’el, was the site a century later where Muslim forces struck the
first major blow against the invading Mongol armies.
“[Israel’s might]
will be shattered by the will of Allah,” Rabab’a said in the
sermon. “Allah will not leave for long the first direction of prayer for
the Islamic nation in the hands of the slayers of the prophets.”
In
January the media monitoring group Palestinian Media Watch released a video of
Grand Mutfi of Jerusalem Mohammed Hussein reciting a hadith (saying attributed
to Islam’s prophet Mohammed) calling for the killing of Jews.
“The day of
judgment will not come until you fight the Jews,” Hussein said in the
clip.
“The Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees
will call, ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of God, this is a Jew behind me, come and kill
him.’” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called on the attorney- general to open
an incitement investigation into the cleric’s remarks, and President Shimon
Peres encouraged the Justice Ministry to open its own
investigation.
Hussein, appointed by the Palestinian Authority, has
refused to retract his comments, insisting he had not called for the killing of
Jews but had simply been quoting the Islamic prophet, whose words he could not
change.
“These allegations come within the Israeli incitement campaign
against Jerusalem and its figures,” he said.
Herb Keinon contributed to
this report.