Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, October 28, 2007

HH #CXXXVIII

This week's Haveil Havalim, the 138th edition pointing out the best of the JBlogosphere, is out at the indefatigable Soccer Dad.

My post on The Bidoon was included.

Check it out!

The best and the brightest PalArabs want more terror

A few days ago was the anniversary of the death of Fathi Shikaki, a master terrorist who co-founded Islamic Jihad. To celebrate, there was a massive rally in Gaza calling on fighting Israel, where Shikaki's successor said, "Palestine was usurped at the hands of the armed Jewish groups by force, and, therefore, it couldn’t be retrieved but by force and resistance....We should not allow ourselves to believe, even for a moment, that our struggle with Israel has come to an end...This conference is dangerous for the Palestinians, because its aim is to drag Arab countries into normalizing their ties with Israel, define its borders, and allow the US to attack Iran. The Palestinians must not participate in this conference."

You might think that these is only the rantings of a single, small terror group, and not representative of the larger PalArab population.

But not only was Islamic Jihad there, but also Hamas leader Islaml Haniyeh, who said, days after fatal clashes between Hamas and Islamic Jihad,"Our relation with Islamic Jihad is strategic, stable and will not be shaken with a few events."

You might think that these sentiments are only endemic throughout Gaza, but not in the more secular, peaceful West Bank. But at Bir Zeit University, where the future leaders of Palestinian Arab society are molded, they also had a celebration of Shakaki's death (autotranslated):

Bir Zeit University students in 12th anniversary of the departure of Dr. Fathi Shakaki affirmed that the resistance and the certificate is correct and proper way, the only solution is to liberate the land of the blessed impurity Zionists rapists.

The Council called in a statement all the resistance factions and cards to escalate the resistance and strike the Zionist occupier everything Ottey force.

Of course we already knew how much Bir Zeit students support terror.

Best Iranian headline of the day

Zionist meddling disturbs Darfur peace

Yes, things were so peaceful in Darfur until those meddling Zionists messed everything up!

Two Jewish professors at Columbia targeted

Apparently, anti-black threats at Columbia are worthy of national attention, but not similar anti-semitic threats:

Police are looking into a new bias incident at Columbia University.

The provost of Teachers College told students Friday that two faculty members received an anti-Semitic cartoon and anti-Zionist letters. School officials have not released the names of the two professors.

Police say the hate crimes unit is aware of the incident.

I only saw one other mention of these incidents, as an aside in an article in the New York Post about a different subject.

2 more women and a child killed in Gaza "work accident"

From JPost:

A powerful explosion went off in a house in southern Gaza on Saturday, killing two women and a four-year-old girl, Palestinian medics and witnesses said.

The cause of the blast in the town of Khan Yunis was not immediately clear.

The blast tore down the facade of the house and badly damaged its interior. A neighboring house was also partially damaged from the force of the blast.

The IDF said it was not carrying out any operations in the area at the time.

Hamas police said they suspected explosives being handled by militants went off prematurely.

Our 2007 count of Palestinian Arabs being violently killed by each other now climbs to 564.
UPDATE: From both Arab sources and YNet it looks like it was two children and an adult woman.
UPDATE 1A: PCHR says 2 18-year old women and one child, so I'm going with that.
UPDATE 2: Hamas blames Israel even though pretty much everyone knows that's BS.
UPDATE 3: Hamas member killed in Rafah by "unknown gunmen."565.

Rabbi Kanefsky's plea to put Jerusalem on the table

A modern Orthodox rabbi from Los Angeles has published an essay in the Jewish Journal saying his reasons why Jerusalem should be negotiated. In order not to take any of his comments out of context I will print the entire article here:

The question of whether we could bear a redivision of Jerusalem is a searing and painful one. The Orthodox Union, National Council of Young Israel and a variety of other organizations, including Christian Evangelical ones, are calling upon their constituencies to join them in urging the Israeli government to refrain from any negotiation concerning the status of Jerusalem at all, when and if the Annapolis conference occurs. And last week, as I read one e-mail dispatch after another from these organizations, I became more and more convinced that I could not join their call.

It's not that I would want to see Jerusalem divided. It's rather that the time has come for honesty. Their call to handcuff the government of Israel in this way, their call to deprive it of this negotiating option, reveals that these organizations are not being honest about the situation that we are in, and how it came about. And I cannot support them in this.

These are extremely difficult thoughts for me to share, both because they concern an issue that is emotionally charged, and because people whose friendship I treasure will disagree strongly with me. And also because I am breaking a taboo within my community, the Orthodox Zionist community. "Jerusalem: Israel's Eternally Undivided Capital" is a 40-year old slogan that my community treats with biblical reverence. It is an article of faith, a corollary of the belief in the coming of the Messiah. It is not questioned. But this final reason why it is difficult for me to share these thoughts is also the very reason that I have decided to do so. This is a conversation that desperately needs to begin.

No peace conference between Israel and the Palestinians will ever produce anything positive until both sides have decided to read the story of the last 40 years honestly. On our side, this means being honest about the story of how Israel came to settle civilians in the territories it conquered in 1967, and about the outcomes that this story has generated.

An honest reading of this story reveals that there were voices in the inner circle of the Israeli government in 1967-1968 who warned that settling civilians in conquered territories was probably illegal under international law. But for very understandable reasons -- among them security needs, Zionist ideologies of both the both secular and religious varieties, memories that were 20 years old, and memories that were 3,000 years old -- these voices were overruled. We can identify with many of the ideas that carried the settlement project forward. But the fact remains that it is simply not honest on our part to pretend that the government of Israel didn't know that there was likely a legal problem, or that the government was confident that international conventions did not apply to this situation. That just wouldn't be an honest telling.

An honest reading of the story reveals that the heroes of Israel's wars who became the ministers in its government, who were most responsible for the initial decision to settle, were quite aware that by doing so they were risking conflict with the Arab population that was living there. They were aware that these Arabs would never be invited to become citizens of Israel, and would never have the rights of citizens. Nonetheless, they decided to go forward. Some believed that the economic benefit that would accrue to these Arabs as a result of their interactions with Israelis and Israel would be so great that they wouldn't mind our military and civilian presence among them. Others projected that some sort of diplomatic arrangement would soon be reached with Jordan that would soften the face of what would otherwise be full-blown military occupation. These may have been reasonable projections at the time. But as it turned out, both of them were wrong. And it's not honest to tell the story without acknowledging that we made these mistakes.

The Religious Zionist leadership (similar to today's Evangelical supporters of Israel) made a different judgment, namely that settling the Biblical heartland would further hasten the unfolding of the messianic age. Thus, the Arab population already there was not our problem. God would deal with it. This belief too -- reasonable though it may have seemed at the time -- has also turned out to be wrong. To tell the story honestly, this mistake too must be acknowledged.

And the difference that honest storytelling makes is enormous. When we tell our story honestly, our position at the negotiating table is one that is informed not only by our own needs and desires, but also by our obligations and responsibilities. The latter include the responsibility to -- in some way, in some measure -- fix that which we have done. Also included is the need to recognize that we have some kind of obligation toward the people who have been harmed by our decisions. Honesty in our telling of the story reveals the stark and candid reality that we also need to speak the language of compromise and conciliation. Not only the language of entitlement and demands.

To be sure, I would be horrified and sick if the worst-case division-of-Jerusalem scenario were to materialize. The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story -- a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don't owe anything to anyone. Cries of protest, in particular from organizations that oppose Israel's relinquishing anything at all between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and which have never offered any alternative solutions to the ones they are protesting against, are rooted in the refusal to read history honestly. And I -- for one -- cannot lend my support to that.

Without a doubt, the Palestinians aren't telling an honest story either. They are not being honest about their record of violence against Jews in the pre-State era, or about the obscene immorality with which they attacked Israeli civilians during the second intifada. They are not being honest about the ways in which their fellow Arabs are responsible for so much of the misery that they -- the Palestinians -- have endured, and they certainly are not being honest about the deep and real historical connection that the Jewish people has to this land and to this holy city. And there will not be peace (and perhaps there should be no peace conference) until they tell an honest story as well. But for us to take the approach that in order to defend and protect ourselves from their dishonest story, we must continue telling our own dishonest story, is to travel a road of unending and unendable conflict. Peace will come only when and if everyone at the table has the courage, the strength, and enough fear of God to tell the story as it really is.

For many decades we have sighed and asked, "When will peace come?" The answer is starkly simple. There will be peace the day after there is truth.

Rabbi Kanefsky says many right things, and he makes a few mistakes, to reach a very wrong conclusion.

He is entirely correct that there cannot be peace until there is truth. Unfortunately, he is not being entirely honest himself as he conflates the history of Jerusalem after 1967 with that of Judea and Samaria - the Israeli government annexed Jerusalem and did offer citizenship to all its Arab residents, so his arguments would be more powerful if he would only be referring to the rest of the West Bank and not Jerusalem.

His major mistakes, though, are not historical but tactical. His yearning for truth in negotiations may be admirable, but when one is in a situation where only one side is willing to tell the truth, it puts that side at an enormous disadvantage in a neutral forum.

I touched upon this point recently when I discussed the British commission of inquiry after the 1929 riots, where they listened to the Arab claims of ownership of the Western Wall and the Jewish claims that only God owns the wall - and they sided with the Arabs. The Jews could have made a compelling legal case for historic ownership of the entire Temple Mount but instead they told the truth. And in that forum, they lost.

Whenever third parties look at competing claims, they make the assumption that both claimants are fundamentally honest and that the truth is somewhere in between. When one side has no compunctions about lying, that side has a tremendous advantage over the side that is willing to admit mistakes. Honesty will be used against the truth-tellers.

Simply put, the Arab/Israeli conflict is a land dispute. If one side claims all the land and the other side equivocates about that question, naturally the side that claims it all is in a position of power.

This is not to say that Israel should lie. Its true claims are powerful enough, if they are not often stated as well as they should be. But this means that Israel should not negotiate by showing its hand as to what it is willing to give up - because these are essentially one-way negotiations, the question is how much land Israel will end up losing, and not what she will get in return because that is intangible (and almost certainly fantasy.) An "honest" negotiator will always lose because you will never find both sides putting on the table their final position.

Israel's legal, moral and historic claims to Jerusalem - and the entire West Bank as well - are very strong, but they have been given up by successive Israeli governments, in some part because of this desire for "honesty." Is Israel in better shape now than before Oslo? Is real peace any closer? Has Israel reaped rewards for its honest negotiations, which translates directly into capitulations?

It is unfortunate but becoming increasingly clear that "peace" is literally impossible with the current generation of Arabs. "Honesty," goodwill gestures, pleading, and the intense interest of most of the world has led to nothing. Israel's relative safety vis a vis its neighbors (as opposed to terror groups) is a result not of peaceful negotiations but because of Israel's success at war.

Sure Israel has made mistakes. No one should cover up errors or change history. But honesty has little to do with negotiations.

Kanefsky's major error is the assumption that both sides want peace and have the capability to deliver, and his advice (glowingly quoted in The Forward) is very, very wrong.

See also "The Case for a Larger Israel" for a completely different way of looking at things.

October Qassam Calendar

As usual, this is far from complete, and it is more to show how ignored the Qassam issue is rather than to show how many are being fired. Many Qassams never make it in the news, and the rare times that the IDF publishes statistics shows that I am usually undercounting by about 50%.

This list does not include mortars being shot from Gaza, which are usually 3-4 times higher on any given day.

Previous calendars:
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February

Hamas mass wedding for 100 grooms. Where are the brides?

From IHT:

The Islamic rulers of Gaza organized a collective wedding party Thursday for 100 couples, distributing almost a month's salary on grooms who celebrated without their brides in observance of Islamic law.

The party, sponsored by the head of the Hamas government, featured a band of drummers, Islamic songs and chocolate bars. About 2,000 relatives attended the party, including the brides, who sat in the audience.

"This is an Islamic wedding. The men are separated from the women," explained Ashraf al-Rifi of Hamas, who helped organize the party.

Despite economic sanctions imposed on Gaza, Hamas has been paying regular cash stipends and monthly allowances to supporters and workers, using money from smuggling and indirect aid.

The wedding party was the latest example. Each groom received a financial donation of $300 (€210), almost a month's salary in the impoverished territory.

The grooms, wearing green sashes with Hamas' name plastered on it, walked from the mosque nearby to the local park where the party was held. They then stood on a stage and swayed to the drumbeats. They were flanked by little girls dressed as brides.

This human interest article, almost as an aside, points out that Gaza's Hamas leaders give money to the people it likes - and doesn't help anyone else.

Egyptian newspaper compares Israeli prison - and Gaza - to Auschwitz

More imbecilic hate from Egypt:

At the notorious Kitziot Prison, a real concentration camp minus gas chambers, crack Israeli soldiers have been ganging up on helpless and fettered Palestinian prisoners, shooting, beating and humiliating them under largely concocted pretexts....

The pogrom-like attack on the helpless Kitziot prisoners lasted for more than two hours as a huge cloud of smoke hovered over the area...
Another man, a plasterer, also unemployed because Israel won't allow raw materials, such as cement, into the Strip, insists on more daring language. "I don't know why the world doesn't call things by their real name. Here the Jews are starving us to death. Gaza is a large concentration camp. It is very much like Auschwitz. Yes, there are no gas chambers and crematoria. But people are dying for lack of food and lack of medicine.

The entire article is so riddled with lies and omissions that it is no wonder that Egyptians hate Jews and Israelis as much as they do - they are incited by pseudo-intellectual haters like this one.

Forgetting the absurd claims that Gaza is a death camp - at least that part is only quoted, not stated as fact (even though the headline screams "Much like Auschwitz") - even comparing Ketziot to a concentration camp is simply Jew-hating slander meant to incite. While Ketziot is no picnic, prisoners watch TV and get newspapers, and a large number of them smuggle in cell phones.

Not to mention that at Ketziot, a thousand prisoners rioted and burned down their own tents, which caused the "huge cloud of smoke" mentioned in the article.

Contrast this with Egypt, whose prisons are scenes of exceptional torture. A recent Al-Jazeera report on torture in Egyptian prisons resulted in Egypt arresting the female reporter and throwing her into one of them. A video of one Egyptian prisoner being sexually assaulted with a stick caused a brief flurry of news earlier this year, and Egyptian authorities regularly use electric shock against prisoners. In 2005, Egyptian police sexually assaulted women at a peaceful demonstration in broad daylight - and they were protesting Egyptian prison torture. Police who do manage to get tried for torture are routinely freed.

If one wanted to compare prisons to concentration camps, one would find that Egypt's prisons fit the definition much better.

The magically disappearing nuclear reactor

From the NYT:

New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.

Two photos, taken Wednesday from space by rival companies, show the site near the Euphrates River to have been wiped clean since August, when imagery showed a tall square building there measuring about 150 feet on a side.

The Syrians reported an attack by Israel in early September; the Israelis have not confirmed that. Senior Syrian officials continue to deny that a nuclear reactor was under construction, insisting that Israel hit a largely empty military warehouse.

But the images, federal and private analysts say, suggest that the Syrian authorities rushed to dismantle the facility after the strike, calling it a tacit admission of guilt.

“It’s a magic act — here today, gone tomorrow,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t lower suspicions, it raises them. This was not a long-term decommissioning of a building, which can take a year. It was speedy. It’s incredible that they could have gone to that effort to make something go away.”

Any attempt by Syrian authorities to clean up the site would make it difficult, if not impossible, for international weapons inspectors to determine that exact nature of the activity there. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna have said they hoped to analyze the satellite images and ultimately inspect the site in person. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that released a report on the Syrian site earlier this week, said the expurgation of the building was inherently suspicious.

“It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” Mr. Albright said in an interview. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.”

h/t EBoZ

PLO, version 2

From the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian Authority officials here expressed concern on Wednesday over attempts by Hamas and other Palestinian radical groups to create a new PLO at a conference due to take place in Syria and the Gaza Strip early next month.

The officials told The Jerusalem Post that they were trying to persuade the Syrian government to ban the conference.

They called on the Arab countries and the US to join their efforts to thwart the planned conference.

The conference, which will bring together several Palestinian "rejectionist" groups, has been called in response to the US-sponsored peace conference, which is due to be held in Annapolis, Maryland, late this year. The conference will be held simultaneously in Damascus and Gaza City through a video-conference link.

"The conference in Damascus will deepen divisions among the Palestinians," warned a senior PA official. "This is the first time that several Palestinian factions are talking about the possibility of establishing an alternative to the PLO, which is still regarded by many Palestinians as their sole and legitimate representative."

In addition to the extremist groups, a number of prominent Palestinian figures have been invited to the conference in Syria, including estranged and veteran PLO leader Farouk Kaddoumi. The Tunisian-based Kaddoumi, who also serves as secretary-general of Fatah, is an outspoken critic of the Oslo Accords and the current PA leadership under Mahmoud Abbas.

Invitations issued by Hamas and its political allies described the Syria parley as the "Palestinian National Conference for Resisting Schemes Aimed at Liquidating the Palestinian Cause."

"Their declared goal is to foil the Annapolis conference," said another PA official. "What's worrying is that the conference will be held under the auspices of the Syrian regime, which is also unhappy with the US efforts to reach a deal between the Israelis and Palestinians."

Notice how the PA official accidentally acknowledges that the current PLO is only considered by "many" PalArabs as their representative, not "most."

Notice also how Hamas manages to set up video-conference links. They must really be starving!

Most of all, though, this is truly deja-vu from the original creation of the PLO:

As in 1964, this movement is not an indigenous Palestinian Arab movement but it sponsored by a separate Arab country (Egypt in 1964, Syria now.)

As in 1964, this new movement is not interested in an independent state but rather in destroying Israel and creating a pan-Arab or pan-Muslim nation-state. (The PLO version 1 didn't put a state in their platform until 1974 and that one was to replace Israel.)

Finally, as in 1964, this version of the PLO has one major political tactic: terrorism.

Four women murdered this week in the PalArab territories

From Ma'an:

Four women were killed in the Palestinian territories this week in an apparent series of feminicides.

A young Palestinian man from the West Bank city of Qalqiliya was accused of killing his two sisters on Thursday. The bodies of Sima and Iyman Al-Adil were found in the family's home Thursday afternoon.

Eyewitnesses said the two women appeared to have been shot. The motive behind the killings is unclear.

The Palestinian General Intelligence Service announced the suspected murderer admitted to killing his sisters after he was arrested. The suspect said his motivation was to protect so-called "family dignity."

Separately, Palestinian medical officials in Gaza City discovered the body of a female university student near Salah Addin Street Thursday.

The officials said the woman, the daughter of a university professor, had disappeared three days ago. They said the woman had been shot several times.

Iyhab Al-Ghussain, a spokesperson for the de facto Interior Ministry in the Gaza Strip, said the security forces are investigating the apparent killing.

Also on Thursday Palestinian security forces in Qalqiliya announced the arrest of suspects in the apparent killing of a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Wafa Wahdan, who was found dead on Monday near a landfill.

I already had reported on the last woman, so the Palestinian Arab self-death count for the year has now climbed to 561, with 37 of them being women and 40 dead children.

Why the horrible Israelis inspect Gaza-bound sugar

From Israel Insider:

The defense establishment decided that Israel will continue to supply products that are essential to prevent hunger, but "luxury" items will not be allowed.

"Oil, they'll get from us. Balsamic vinegar - no," Haaretz quoted a security source as saying.

Since Israel changed Gaza's status, it has blocked the shipment of certain merchandise into the Strip, including cigarettes, electric appliances, furniture, and toys. After Gaza-based terrorist groups tried to hide potassium for use in explosives in sacks of sugar, Israeli authorities also started inspecting sugar being brought to Gaza.

Do you think that the pro-terror crowd will mention that when they whine about Israeli restrictions on goods to Gaza?

Arrest in Lakewood rabbi beating case

From the Asbury Park Press:

Police have arrested a suspect and charged him with attempted murder of an Orthodox rabbi and schoolteacher, who was viciously beaten with an aluminum baseball bat the night of Oct. 9 while walking to synagogue to pray.
Lee Tucker, 37, of Ventura Drive is charged in the attack on Rabbi Mordechai Moskowitz, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, and unlawful possession of a weapon. Tucker was being held at the Ocean County Jail, Toms River, on $375,000 bail, Detective Lt. Joseph Isnardi said.
Tucker was arrested Wednesday afternoon near the Lakewood Community Center, about eight blocks from Princeton Avenue and Carey Street, where the attack occurred.
Moskowitz, 53, of Lakewood, is a third-grade teacher at Lakewood Cheder School, Detective Steve Wexler said. He remains hospitalized in a rehabilitation center for injuries to his face and head.
Moskowitz's nephew, Moshe Rothberg of Lakewood, called the arrest like having a huge weight lifted from the family. Rothberg said the attack had taken a terrible toll on the family, and speculation that it was a bias attack made dealing with it even more difficult.
"We were focusing on him getting better," Rothberg said. "The last thing we wanted it to be was bias. You don't want to think that someone has so much hate that they would do that."
Police had said from the start that they did not believe the attack to be based on bias, although they have not established what the motive might have been, Isnardi said.
Rothberg praised the Police Department and particularly Chief Robert C. Lawson, who worked with the family, assuring them that detectives would solve the crime, Rothberg said.
"He answered every question and had said he strongly believed it was not a bias incident," Rothberg said of Lawson. "The detectives were working double shifts, and now we can finally rest. They went way beyond the call of duty."
Police developed additional leads on Tucker after the Vaad — Lakewood's Council of Orthodox Leaders — and the Anti-Defamation League offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, Isnardi said. People came forward with pieces of information, Isnardi said.

Sometimes it appears that people bend over backwards to deny bias - not because of the facts but because they don't want to deal with the reaction.

As I mentioned previously, one news outlet reported that the attacker was yelling "Jew! Jew!" during the attack. And, interestingly, the Asbury Press article declines to identify the race of the accused attacker - a somewhat relevant fact if it was a bias crime. (He is black.)

More Holy Temple denial

Yet another prominent Palestinian Muslim (probably the same as in this Arabic article from yesterday) is claiming that there was never a Temple on the Temple Mount, and that Jews should not be allowed to worship at the Kotel:

The former mufti of Jerusalem, Ikrema Sabri, has made the claim that there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount, and the Western Wall was really part of a mosque.

"There was never a Jewish temple on Al-Aksa [the mosque compound] and there is no proof that there was ever a temple," he told The Jerusalem Post via a translator. "Because Allah is fair, he would not agree to make Al-Aksa if there were a temple there for others beforehand."

Sabri rejected Judaism's claim to the Western Wall as part of the outer wall of the Second Temple.

"The wall is not part of the Jewish temple. It is just the western wall of the mosque," he said. "There is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews."

Asked if Jews would ever be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount under Muslim control, he replied: "It is not the Temple Mount, you must say Al-Aksa. And no Jews have the right to pray at the mosque. It was always only a mosque - all 144 dunams, the entire area. No Jewish prayer. If the Jews want real peace, they must not do anything to try to pray on Al-Aksa. Everyone knows that."

"Zionism tries to trick the Jews claiming that this was part of a Jewish temple, but they dug there and they found nothing," Sabri added.

Notice the typical Muslim extremist "logic" - that if you want "peace" you must allow Muslims to take over everything. "Everyone knows that."

I have put here some of the "nothing" found there - Hebrew letters spelling "To the house of the (shofar) blast to..." Josephus wrote that a Kohen would blow the shofar from on top of the Temple every Friday afternoon to announce the coming of the Sabbath, and every Saturday night to announce that the Sabbath was over, and he did this from a high wall of the Temple Mount enclosure in order for most of Jerusalem to hear.

Treppenwitz' comments on this must be read as well.

UPDATE: Aussie Dave at Israellycool mentioned that this former Grand Mufti said the exact same thing four years ago.