Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi made the following “observations” which aired on Palestinian Arab Al-Aqsa TV, September 12, 2008:

Studies conducted in Tel Aviv and in the Palestinian lands occupied by the Jews showed that they plant trees around their homes, because the Prophet Muhammad said that when the Muslims fight the Jews, each and every stone and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The only exception is the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews, and if they hide behind it, it will not reveal their presence. According to reports of people who went there and saw it with their own eyes, man Jews plant gharqad trees around their homes, so that when the fighting begins, they can hide behind them. They are not man enough to stand and fight you.

Muslim Waffen SS soldiers reading a pamphlet by the Mufti of Jerusalem Haj-Amin el-Husseini. From Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the Mufti.

These Jew-hating motifs were reiterated by Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments Talat Afifi, during an interview shown on Sada Al-Balad TV, March 14, 2013. In response to an interviewer’s query about visiting Israel with “only with a Palestinian visa,” Afifi replied,

This is premature. Let’s wait until it happens. However, we hope that the words of the Prophet Muhammad will be fulfilled: “Judgment Day will not come before the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: Oh Muslim , oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him – except for the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews.” We fully believe that the future of this land lies with Islam and the Muslims.

While such hatemongering statements appear utterly bizarre to Jews devoid of any understanding of Islam’s foundational texts, and notwithstanding Sinem Tezyapar’s attempt to negate this reality in The Jewish Press, Egyptian cleric Ali Afifi, and earlier, Saudi cleric Al-Arifi’s inflammatory references to Jews, have sacralized origins immediately apparent to Muslim audiences. The crux of their remarks, in fact, merely reiterate verbatim, a canonical hadith, specifically Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985, which is also featured prominently in the Hamas Covenant, article 7.

Briefly (see 1, 2, 3, 4 for an in depth 4-part discussion), what are the hadith, and which specific antisemitic motifs do they contain? Hadith, which means “story” (“narrative”), refers to any report of what the Muslim prophet Muhammad said or did, or his tacit assent to something said or done in his presence. (Hadith is also used as the technical term for the “science” of such “traditions”). As a result of a lengthy process which continued for centuries after Muhammad’s death (in 632), the hadith emerged for Muslims as second in authority to the Koran itself. Sunna, which means “path” refers to a normative custom of Muhammad or of the early Islamic community. The hadith “justify and confirm” the Sunna. Henri Lammens, a seminal early 20th century scholar of Islam, highlighted the importance of the Sunna (and, by extension, the hadith):

As early as the first century A.H. [the 7th century] the following aphorism was pronounced: “The Sunna can dispense with the Koran but not the Koran with the Sunna.” Proceeding to still further lengths, some Muslims assert that “in controversial matters, the Sunna overrules the authority of the Koran, but not vice versa”…all admit the Sunna completes and explains it [the Koran].

The hadith compiled by al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (d. 875) are considered, respectively, to be the most important authoritative collections. The titles Sahih (“sound”) or Jami, indicating their comprehensiveness, signify the high esteem in which they are held. Their comprehensive content includes information regarding religious duties, law and everyday practice (down to the most mundane, or intimate details), in addition to a considerable amount of biographical and other material. Four other compilations, called Sunan works, which indicates that they are limited to matters of religious and social practice, and law, also became authoritative. Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Tirmidhi (d. 892), Ibn Maja (d. 896), and al-Nasi (d. 915) compiled these works. By the beginning of the 12th century, Ibn Maja’s collection became the last of these compilations of hadith to be recognized as “canonical.”

The uber-left Jew-hating Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s headline today reads: “U.S. Jewish groups call on synagogue to cancel anti-Muslim speaker.”

Wow, Haaretz implies that the anti-Israel groups and boycott-Israel groups “Jewish Voice for Peace,” “Jews for Racial and Economic Justice,” and “Jews Say No!” represent “US Jewish groups.” No, they represent anti-Jewish and anti-Israel groups.

These are vicious anti-Jewish groups bent on destroying the tiny Jewish state. The libel and lies by anti-Jewish Haaretz continue as they label me “anti-Muslim.” Haaretz is defaming and libeling those who expose Islamic Jew-hatred as “anti-Muslim.” Anti-Muslim — as if opposing jihad and the most brutal ideology on the face of the earth, the sharia, is “anti-Muslim.” Obviously Haaretz believes that all Muslims support sharia and jihad, or else they would not use that smear. Yet their assumption is in direct contradiction to the idea that most Muslims are “moderate.”

I am not anti-Muslim or anti-anyone, and this label smears my work in defense of the freedom of speech and equality of rights for all as a campaign against a group of people.

But what do you expect from the newspaper that endorses stone-throwing by “Palestinian” jihadists?

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This isn’t Cpl. Dina Ovadia’s first Passover in Israel. Slowly, slowly she seems to be moving away from her Egyptian past and becoming further ingrained in her Israeli present.

Instead of thinking about her bittersweet childhood in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, Cpl. Ovadia fills her time with her army service and in preparing her home in Rimonim, in Samaria, for the Passover holiday. Today it is possible to say that she is far more Dina Ovadia than she is Rolin Abdallah – the name her family gave her as a security measure for a Jew living in an Arab country. But Dina herself grew up totally unaware of her Jewish heritage.

Dina is telling her winding, unbelievable story for the umpteenth time, but her eyes still well up with tears. Ovadia, now 22, left her family home in Alexandria for the last time as a young and curious 15-year-old girl. All she wanted was to fit in.

“Everyone always looked at me as though I was something different, the ugly duckling in the class. They asked me why I dressed the way I did, and why I spoke with my parents during the breaks, and why this and why that. I myself didn’t understand where it all came from. But I always had friends,” she says in impeccable Hebrew with a slight Arabic lilt. “I didn’t have a religious background in Christianity or in Islam. I never knew what I truly was. My parents didn’t keep the [Jewish] traditions, and I always assumed that we were secular Christians.”

Dina’s childhood detachment from her heritage gives unique meaning to every Shabbat candle she lights now and to every Jewish holiday that she did not know. And Cpl. Ovadia’s story is the Passover story, thousands of years old, expressing itself again in the 21st century.

“I have surely seen the affliction of My people that are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their pains” – Exodus 3:7

Rolin in Arabic means gentleness, but Dina was first and foremost a curious and rebellious child. She felt she had a right to belong, but she didn’t know where.

“I studied in a Muslim school. I started to grow up and learn the Koran, and then I already started to ask myself, ‘Why am I learning this?’

“I reached a stage where I got really into it, studying for tests, memorizing passages. At school they asked me to start wearing a veil to my Koran lessons. I didn’t like the idea – as a girl it seemed ugly to me,” she smiles. The disagreement led to her parents enrolling Dina in a private Christian school, where she was more at ease. “It was really fun and I felt freer,” she says.

Dina recalls how she tried to find herself among the troubling mix of religions. “We had a mosque next to the school, and the girls would go there to pray. I told this to my mother, slightly anxiously, and she was very angry. They forbade me from doing it again. I remember that I was hurt, and I started to tell them that because of that they won’t like us, and that I wouldn’t have any friends. It was the anger of a child. During Ramadan I would escape to my friend’s houses, and I even fasted on one of the days, because I always wanted to belong to something and I didn’t have a clear answer for what I was,” Dina explains.

When she told her parents that she had tried praying in a church, that didn’t make them any happier. They distanced her from every religion, without giving an explanation as to why.

The turning point occurred on a day like any other. Dina was studying for a history test, her brother and cousin were playing on the computer upstairs, and her mother, aunt and sister were also at home. Suddenly the sounds of shouting and shattering glass cut through the calm routine. “I really panicked, and immediately I thought that because we were different they had come to our house. I went outside and saw five masked faces – they were Salafists.” Five bearded men in robes, with clubs in their hands and rifles slung over their shoulders, broke through the electric iron gate at the entrance to the grand family home and demanded to know where the men of the house were. Their explanation was as simple as it was incomprehensible: “A’lit el’Yahud” – a Jewish family.

“I thought, ‘What the hell!?’ I didn’t understand why they were saying that we were a Jewish family. Anyone who was different, the stranger, was always called ‘the Jew.’ I was certain that they were mistaken. They entered the house. My mother said that the men weren’t there, and they threw her into the corridor, she slammed into the pillars, and she fainted. I started to scream – I was sure that they had killed her. And then I saw two of them going up the stairs. I heard shots. I was sure that they had murdered both my brother and my cousin.”

The Salafists went down the stairs and told the Abdallah family that they had a few days to get out of the country, and that in the meantime they could not leave their home. They threatened that if the children went to school, they would be kidnapped. Only then did they leave.

Luckily, the whole family escaped injury. The armed men shot at the boys’ heads, missing deliberately in order to scare them. “I think that today they would have just killed us all,” she says. From the moment of that home invasion, Dina’s life became entangled in a complex loop, while the two irreconcilable edges of her life began to unravel. “The Salafists would encircle the house in their vehicles, shooting into the air. That month even the school didn’t call. I slept with my mother – I was terribly afraid. My father told me that they are just thieves despite the fact that they didn’t take anything. ‘Jew’ was really a kind of swear word, he said; but I couldn’t believe him.”

A few days later, her grandfather gathered all of his family together and he revealed the truth. “He explained why he kept us from other religions and told us that we were Jewish, and we that we had little time to leave Egypt. He told us we were going to Israel. I remember the little ones at home were excited about it, but I wasn’t. I started crying and was so disappointed. I told him I did not want to move to that bad country. I rebelled against it.”

Dina knew very little about Jews as a child. “In school they always taught us to hate Jews and Israelis,” she says. “Let’s take Koran class for example. I would be sitting, taking a test, and would read a verse that said you need to kill Jews. I also remember during the Second Intifada, all the TV programs I watched that always said that Israelis are bad. I cried over the story of Mohammed al-Dura.

“My grandfather did his best to explain to us that they’re not bad, that we have to understand that in war, that’s what happens. At home we were always taught that all human beings are equal and you have to respect them for who they are, no matter what their background. In school they taught us that Israel is the enemy. They would say when I grew up that I would understand. During the Intifada I was even at demonstration, waving the Palestinian flag. It never even occurred to me that I was Jewish.”

The Jewish stereotype present in Egypt was similar to what was taught in the darker racial theories of the early 20th Century. “I knew that Jews were scary, were murderers, had big noses, ears and had beards. On television you would always see babies burning in Gaza, things I’ve never seen in Israel, but that’s what we thought.”

Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which I gave to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give unto them and to their children after them.’ – Deuteronomy 1:8

Before this dramatic turn of events, Dina tried to understand where all her friends had disappeared to. They hadn’t even called to say hello throughout the whole month.

“I had a really good group of friends,” Dina says. “We lived really close to one another, and we used to sleep over at each other’s houses. I begged my mother to go and see one of them, and in the end she let me go. I knocked on her door. She opened it, made a face and slammed the door on me. What my grandfather told me passed through my head at exactly that moment: we grew up together and just because she heard that I was Jewish she doesn’t accept me anymore? That really hit me. I said: I know that the Jews are bad, but look; I’m not bad. By this time, I had totally broken down. Right then I realized that this wasn’t the right place for me. They couldn’t accept me for who I was.”

Modern Exodus

The day of Dina’s aliyah was tinged with the sadness of leaving her house and turning her back on where she grew up.

“The whole situation had made me feel a lot of hatred, and I realized that I had nothing there,” she says. “It turned out that my uncle, who I thought had run away to France, had actually made aliyah to Israel and had enlisted in the IDF. In Egypt there is a mandatory conscription law, and when the authorities began to investigate, they found out the truth, and my family bore the consequences. But this moment was about to come regardless of any connection to my uncle.

“My parents understood that their children were all growing up, and that they no longer had answers to our questions. We didn’t take anything with us except our clothes. We just left our house exactly as it was. On that same day I saw how my friends were looking at us while we were packing our things, so I just closed the blinds. I finally understood that this wasn’t my home. It was as if Egypt itself was closing the blinds on me.”

After a brief flight to Istanbul and then on to Tel Aviv, Dina suddenly found herself in a land that just a month before she had felt so far away from, mentally if not physically.

“I was scared,” she says. “Who was going to welcome us? What if they didn’t like me? When I got off the plane all I saw was people smiling at us, and that made me so happy. My uncle, his family and the rabbi were waiting for us and smiling. It was weird – I didn’t understand the language, but I felt at peace, and from somewhere my friends’ rejection of me gave me strength – the strength to change myself.”

The family settled in Jerusalem, and Dina and her relatives joined a religious school. “I so badly wanted to fit in, but the first time I read the siddur, I was holding it upside down,” she laughs. Dina’s new beginning wasn’t free of difficulties. “One day I was walking down the corridor at school, and one of the girls said, “Hey, Arab girl!” and she and her friends started a fight with my cousin and me. Not a very nice welcome.”

After high school, Dina began her military service as an assistant Army Radio reporter on Arab affairs. She then moved to the military police for a short period, and finally joined the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, where she helps run new media in Arabic on a variety of platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Her sister Sima is set to join her in the Spokesperson’s Unit, and her brother is currently doing a selective Air Force course.

This article, lightly edited, was written by Florit Shoihet for the IDF Website

A major survey among Belgian teenagers indicated anti-Semitism was seven times more prevalent among Muslim youths than in non-Muslim teenagers.

Conducted in recent months by three universities for the Flemish government, the survey was published last month based on questionnaires filled out by 3,867 high school students in Antwerp and Ghent, including 1,068 Muslims.

Among Muslims, 50.9 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Jews foment war and blame others for it” compared to only 7.1 percent among non-Muslims. Among Muslims, 24.5 percent said they partially agreed with the statement, as did 20.6 percent of non-Muslims.

The statement “Jews seek to control everything” received a 45.1 approval rating among Muslims compared to 10.8 approval among non-Muslims. Of Muslims, 27.9 percent said they partially agreed, as did 29.2 percent of non-Muslims.

About 35 percent of Muslims agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much clout in Belgium” compared to 11.8 percent of non-Muslims who participated in the “Young in Antwerp and Ghent” survey. The results were part of a 360-page report which was produced for the Flemish government’s Youth Research Platform by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; GhentUniversity and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Claude Marinower, Antwerp’s alderman for education, told JTA he found the data “most troubling.” In an interview for the Antwerp-based monthly Joods Actueel, Marinower announced he would launch an action plan to fight anti-Semitism in the Flemish capital’s schools.

The results of the recent elections expressed a new national social agenda. The world of Left and Right to which we have become so accustomed is melting away. In the national consciousness, the old debate between peace and security has become irrelevant. Nobody really has high expectations from the peace process and most Israelis don’t really care about the settlements. The new agenda is on the continuum between existence and destiny: civil identity as opposed to Jewish identity.

The Knesset seats that could have gone to Likud went to Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Naftali Bennett’s HaBayit HaYehudi. The Likud, which avoided speaking about its own ideology and did not even bother to publicize its platform, has leaned on the Left for years. As long as there were leftists, the Likud could identify itself as “not Left.” Prior to the elections, the splintered Left masked its ideology (with the exception of Meretz). The Left was no longer left. It looked like a Likud victory was going to be easier than ever.

But just the opposite happened. The Likud no longer enjoyed the energizing leftist contra. It no longer had the synagogue where it would never pray. The Likud remained without identity, while on both of its sides, parties that offered Israeli society identity – civil or national – flourished.

When Yitzhak Rabin’s granddaughter, Noa Rotman, blamed me this week for being responsible for her grandfather’s assassination, she brought society’s conversation back to that bad place. My first reaction was to ignore her accusations, but on second thought I understood that I had no choice but to demand an apology.

The struggle against the Oslo Accords encompassed a huge swath of society that was very seriously harmed and that suffered a painful process of demonization and dehumanization. It is not about a personal insult, but rather an insult to a broad public. Thus, I do not have the right to forgive this insult. If I were to do so, the demonization would never end. It is specifically the fear of a libel suit that will prevent more of these statements, and will clear the public domain so that we may continue the positive process of a shared search for meaning – a process that is already well underway.

More and more, I understand that the deep meaning of Judaism is embodied in the vision of liberty. The message of the holiday of Pesach – the message of liberty, from bondage to freedom so that we may shoulder the yoke of Heaven – is the quintessence of Judaism.

The struggle for Israeli sovereignty on the Temple Mount – the site of the holy Temple, the place chosen by the King of the world as the dwelling place for His Divine Presence – is actually humanity’s struggle in the transition from enslavement to liberty. It is no coincidence that the Exodus from Egypt has become the symbol of liberty and was the model for the founding fathers of the United States.

This is where we must lead the new Israeli consciousness: from bondage to liberty.

This column was translated from the Hebrew version, which appeared in Makor Rishon.

President Obama’s visit to Israel, and particularly his speech to 500 university students, was a winner at many levels including one he probably had not even considered. In how many countries can the President of the United States call forth the passions of the local people and have confidence that he is calling forth the “better angels”? He did it in Israel.

The President touched on deeply felt emotions for Israelis, worked hard at erasing the faux pas of relating Israel’s national origins to the Holocaust, twice declined to call Israeli settlements “illegal” while standing next to P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas, and he praised Israeli technology, ingenuity, democracy and culture. Remarking on the upheaval in the Arab world he said, “So much of what people in the region are seeking is happening here [Israel].”

Yes, that is something he should have said in Cairo or Ramallah. And yes, he called for a “two state solution” that has little chance of success. And yes, yes, he made false analogies between Palestinians and Israelis. And yes, yes, yes, he called Abbas, whose single elected term expired in 2009 and who has been increasingly repressive and willing to incite against Israel and the U.S., a “partner.” And no, Israel cannot “reverse an undertow of isolation,” that is generated by other people in other lands who do not accept that, at the end of any “peace process,” Israel will still exist.

But okay. Those are things that should have been and were expected from President Obama. It was also expected that he would encourage his youthful, carefully selected, leftish college student audience to push the rightish government of Israel to do what he could not convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to do. He directly asked the audience to pressure its government.

In full campaign mode, Mr. Obama told them:

Speaking as a politician, I can promise you this: political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see. (People can) overcome a legacy of mistrust that they inherited from their parents… Your voices must be louder than the extremists who would drown them out. Your hopes must light the way forward.

That is a call to protest, to political insurrection. The interesting part is that he assumed igniting a political firestorm in Israel would have a positive effect.

Unspoken — maybe because the President had not expressly thought it — was that if young Israelis “do it,” if they “create the change they want to see,” what they create will be a force for good. He assumed without saying it that the voices they would raise would be voices for peace. He assumed without saying it that Israeli hopes are hopes for peace. And he is right, although it should be said that hopes for peace reside all along the Israeli political spectrum. Those of the right want peace no less than those of the left; they just have different levels of skepticism.

But what if it is not peace in the hearts of the people, but something malign?

Mr. Obama referenced his Cairo speech to the Israelis:

Four years ago, I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young people. Politically, religiously, they must seem a world away. But the things they want — they’re not so different from you. The ability to make their own decisions; to get an education and a good job; to worship God in their own way; to get married and have a family. The same is true of the young Palestinians that I met in Ramallah this morning, and of young Palestinians who yearn for a better life in Gaza. That is where peace begins — not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people.

Certainly the beginning of the Arab uprising in Tunis and in Tahrir Square was focused on jobs and justice (although not on “peace” with Israel or anyone else). But the result was not the flowering of education, work and peaceful relations. It was the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, violence and the collapse of the Egyptian economy. And clearly many of the Brotherhood’s supporters are young Egyptians. Intolerance for Egypt’s Coptic citizens and the increasing violence in several cities attest to the dangers of calling for changes in or of government. Without wanting a return to the repression of the old government, it is safe to say that the revolution did not bring forth a better one.

The official Palestinian Authority daily ran an article two days before President Barack Obama touched down in Israel with a “welcome” diatribe that exonerates Muslims of any guilt for the 9/11 attacks, accuses pro-Zionists of being responsible, and implies that Hitler was greater than former U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Under the headline “Had Hitler won, Nazism would be an honor,” the op-ed tells readers that “internal American action” was responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The article was in the Monday edition of the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida  and was translated and published online by the Palestinian Media Watch, which has been a prime source for Congressmen trying to get it through to the American government that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority speak differently in Arabic than they do in English.

“Our history is replete with lies… [including] the lie about Al-Qaeda and the September 11 events, which asserted that Muslim terrorists committed it, and that it was not an internal American action by the Freemasons,” the states the op-ed by Hassan Ouda Abu Zaher.

“Had Hitler won, Nazism would be an honor that people would be competing to belong to, and not a disgrace punishable by law.”

“Churchill and Roosevelt were alcoholics, and in their youth were questioned more than once about brawls they started in bars, while Hitler hated alcohol and was not addicted to it. He used to go to sleep early and wake up early, and was very organized. These facts have been turned upside down as well, and Satan has been dressed with angels’ wings.”

Thirty-eight physicians from Europe have written a paper alleging that “cultural bias” was behind the pro-circumcision stance of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The commentary, published on March 18 on the website of the U.S.-based Pediatric Journal, disputes a report which the American academy on children’s health published in August, which states that “benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks but the benefits are not great enough to recommend universal newborn circumcision.”

The European reply states that “seen from the outside, cultural bias reflecting the normality of non-therapeutic male circumcision in the United States seems obvious. The report’s conclusions are different from those reached by physicians in other parts of the Western world.”

The benefits attributed in the American report to circumcision — including protection against HIV, genital herpes, genital warts and penile cancer — are “questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves,” the European authors wrote.

In the U.S., a large percentage of non-Jewish males are circumcised, whereas in Europe the custom is limited almost exclusively to Jews and Muslims.

However, the  European physicians that there is “some theoretical relevance”: to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ claim that circumcision may offer protection against urinary tract infections in infant boys,, Nevertheless, the Europeans added, “This “can easily be treated with antibiotics without tissue loss,” they wrote.

About half of the European physicians are from Scandinavian countries, where several political parties have stated their opposition to circumcision as a form of “child abuse,” or unwanted phenomenon of immigration  by Muslims.