Lebanese university seminar: Burn the Jews [News, p.7]

Lebanon's largest government university recently hosted a Hizbullah television symposium in which Arabs were urged "to wipe Israel off the map," the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported on Thursday. The symposium was held on the anniversary of the passing of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947. Broadcast on Hizbullah's Al-Manar TV, the Universite Libanaise event was devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its participants included Shafiq al-Hut, a former PLO representative in Lebanon, and Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian students. At the outset, a student of political science named Hisham Sham'as declared that "Israel must be wiped out." Challenged by the unnamed mediator that "this motto is unrealistic," the student responded, "There is no such thing as unrealistic... Just like Hitler fought the Jews. We are a great Islamic nation of jihad, and we too should fight the Jews and burn them." Another unnamed student added, "Avian flu hit the entire world, and they are trying to find a cure for it now. As for Israel, the only cure for it is to wipe it off the map." A third student speaker, Mahmoud Fakhri, after being encouraged by the mediator to "go ahead and incite," said, "In all honesty, the Arab people should overturn the disappointing regimes." "In all honesty, any disappointing government that wants to normalize relations with the Zionist enemy and to sell out the Arab cause, and especially Jerusalem, the people must topple this regime and have its say," he added. MEMRI, an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East, noted that according to its Web site the Universite Libanaise is "morally independent and enjoys administrative, academic and financial autonomy."