By JPOST.COM STAFF
Sheikh Raed Salah, the head of the Islamic Movement's northern branch, will not obey a Jerusalem police order to attend an investigation over his alleged incitement, the group announced on Thursday, citing "information from credible sources" that there were plans to assassinate Salah.
In January, Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz indicted Salah for incitement to violence and racism in a speech he made last year protesting the archaeological dig carried out at the Old City's Mughrabi Gate.
During his sermon in Jerusalem's Wadi Joz neighborhood on February 16, 2007, Salah urged supporters to start a third intifada to "save the Aksa Mosque, free Jerusalem and end the occupation."
A statement issued by the movement on Thursday read: "The Israeli regime has been allowing our blood to be split by its continuing incitement, one of the results being the massacre in Shfaram perpetrated by the terrorist Eden Natan Zada and another the attempt to blow up the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth."
In August 2005, Zada, an AWOL soldier, shot dead four Israeli Arabs on an Egged bus in the Galilee town. And in March 2006, former policeman Haim Eliahu Havivi, 44, his wife Violet and their daughter Odelia, 20, went into the Nazareth church and threw firecrackers, in an effort to get three of their children back from social services.
On Monday, Salah denied any Israeli or Jewish historical claim to Jerusalem, saying there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount.
"The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here," he said.
At a press conference he convened in Jerusalem to respond to voices calling for the expulsion of residents of the city who participate in terrorist activities against Israel, Salah said: "Those calling for the expulsion of Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem are hysterical and stupid and belong in the trash can."