Palestinian TV: Jews
torture in name of God

JERUSALEM — In spite of recent reports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has reformed his government-controlled media, a new song broadcast last week on Palestinian television accuses Jews of torturing, mutilating and killing Palestinians in the name of God.

In the program, “A Mirror of the Palestinian Heritage,” women are seen dancing in a music video that claims Israel commits war crimes against Palestinians in the name of the Jewish religion. One woman pens the words “a mirror of the Palestinian heritage” over a map of Israel, portraying all of Israel as occupied “Palestine.”

The words to the song, translated by Palestinian Media Watch, include:

Here I am O Lord, alive
In your name, my God, they tortured me
In your name, my God, they banished me
In your name they exterminated
In your name they ruled.

With bombs they burned us
In blood they drowned us
In dungeons they cuffed us
On the anvil they put us.

The Palestinian media have for years used songs and music videos as a method of inciting viewers against Israel, many times mandating the killing of Jews as a religious necessity for Muslims, reports PMW.

Sharon and other Israeli leaders in February credited Abbas for helping to lower official incitement in the Palestinian media against Israel. But several weeks later, following a suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv nightclub that killed five, Voice of Palestine, the official radio station of the Palestinian Authority, claimed in Arabic hours after the attack the area bombed “may have looked like a nightclub, but it was not innocent. Rather, it was a high-level Israeli military target.”

The Palestinian station told its listeners information received from a “very senior Israeli officer” indicated “an elite unit of the occupation army” was meeting in the nightclub and was the target of the “martyr” operation.

Two days later, Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, an official newspaper directed by Abbas’ Fatah Party, ran a front-page picture of the suicide bomber, identified as Abdullah Badran, 21, a university student from near the West Bank town of Tulkarem, with a caption calling him a “martyr.”

Earlier in January, Palestinian Authority television blamed the Jews for causing the tsunami in southeast Asia, and preached the destruction of Israel and the U.S.

“The Muslim remembers how the Jews corrupted the land. … They invest in the East Asian countries, which were destroyed [by the tsunami] because of the Jewish and American corruption and destruction,” said Palestinian preacher Sheik Ibrahim Madiras Friday during his weekly sermon broadcast on PA television.

A week before that, Palestinian television featured a senior PA academic, Dr. Hassan Khater, founder of the Al Quds Encyclopedia, saying the killing of Jews is mandated by the prophet Muhammad.

Khater, quoting what he said was Islamic tradition, told viewers, “Muhammad said in his Hadith: ‘The Hour [Day of Resurrection] will not arrive until you fight the Jews, [until a Jew will hide behind a rock or tree] and the rock and the tree will say: Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Natan Sharansky recently compiled a report, “Kill a Jew – Go to Heaven,” in which he blasted the PA for disseminating what he said was Nazi-like propaganda.

“As in Nazi Germany, there is an entire ‘culture of hatred’ in Palestinian society today, from textbooks to crossword puzzles, from day camps to TV music videos,” Sharansky said. “Calling for the murder of Jews, as Jews, is the end result.”