JERUSALEM – In comments made to WND on Wednesday, leaders of Hamas supported the anti-Israel statements last weekend by President Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright Jr..
Speaking Saturday at a Washington rally hosted by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Wright slammed Israel as an apartheid state that must be boycotted and declared “Jesus was a Palestinian.”
Two Hamas officials were contacted by phone for comment on Wright’s remarks. Neither had heard about Wright’s statements, but when the pastor’s full remarks were read to the jihadists, both were enthralled by his sentiments.
Senior Hamas leader Salah Bardawil, who is also a member of Hamas’s parliament, declared Wright was correct that “Israel is definitely an apartheid state.”
“It’s enough to see roads in the West Bank to see there are roads for settlers and for Palestinians,” Bardawil said.
The Hamas leader left out that there are main West Bank roads where both Israeli and Palestinian vehicles can travel. He also failed to mention that the cordoning off of some roads outside Palestinian cities for Palestinian vehicles only came in response to the Second Palestinian Intifada, in which Israelis were repeatedly killed in roadside shootings by Palestinians.
Bardawil continued: “It’s unanimous in human rights organizations that Israel is the only apartheid state left in world, and the least the international community can do is to declare Israel is apartheid, and it should have the same treatment to Israel that it had with the South African refugees and boycott Israel because Israeli policy goes against humanity.”
Bardawil was speaking about the only democracy in the Middle East and the only country in the region where Jews, Muslims and Christians have full human rights.
The Hamas leader did not mention that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared Jews are not allowed to live in a future Palestinian state and that currently under PA rules Arabs who sell property to Jews are subject to death.
Also contacted by WND, Hamas senior spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said he didn’t hear about Wright’s comments but he supports any statements calling Israel an apartheid state.
Speaking on Saturday, while Palestinians that very day carried out multiple stabbing attacks on Jewish civilians as part of a “wave of terror,” Wright declared, “The youth in Ferguson and the youth in Palestine have united together to remind us that the dots need to be connected.”
“Palestinians’ lives matters. We stand with you,” he told the crowd.
Wright asked the audience to “please remember, Jesus was a Palestinian, the Palestinian people have had the Europeans come and take their country, ignoring United Nations resolutions, after resolution, after resolution, – over 40 resolutions – and illegally occupied territories, as they take the people who’s [country] it is, and make it theirs, because their God told them that they could have somebody else’s country.”
According to Wright, African Americans, Native Americans and Palestinians each have suffered under the “three-headed demon” of “racism, militarism and capitalism.”
Wright continued: “Boycott, divestment and sanction is how we fought non-violently to bring an end to apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid is going on in Palestine as we sit here.
“There’s an apartheid wall being built, twice the size of the Berlin Wall in height, keeping Palestinians off of illegally occupied territories, where the Europeans have claimed that land as their own.”
The rally was held to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March spearheaded by Farrakhan.
Wright was Obama’s personal pastor from 1988 to 2008, when Obama distanced himself from Wright and his Trinity United Church in Chicago after controversial remarks by Wright were broadcast by the news media.
WND reported Obama’s face was on the cover of an anti-American magazine run by Wright several times, appearing on one issue alongside Farrakhan.
Issues of Wright’s Trumpet magazine have suggested America was guilty of genocide in Africa, decried the Fourth of July as the “national holiday of the dominant culture,” referred to America as a “diaspora” for blacks, repudiated American patriotism and entertained suggestions the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks before they were carried out.
WND broke the story that during the time Obama attended Wright’s Trinity church, the house of worship reprinted a manifesto by a senior Hamas leader that defended terrorism as legitimate resistance, refused to recognize the right of Israel to exist and compared the terror group’s official charter – which calls for the murder of Jews – to America’s Declaration of Independence.
In his July 22, 2007, church newsletter, Wright reprinted an article by Mousa Abu Marzook, identified in the publication as a “deputy of the political bureau of Hamas.”
