Israel sends Islamic Movement sheik to prison for incitement
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Version 0 of 1. KAFR KANNA, ISRAEL — An Israeli judge sentenced the firebrand sheik who leads a branch of the influential Islamic Movement in Israel to 11 months in jail on Tuesday for incitement that led to violent demonstrations at a holy site in Jerusalem years ago. Raed Salah, a popular but polarizing figure among Arab Israelis, was appealing an earlier sentence, but his efforts were overruled in a Jerusalem court. He will enter Israeli prison next month, and his sentencing comes amid sky-high tensions in Israel between Palestinians and Jews. Salah was convicted of inciting terror in a sermon he gave in 2007 when he promised that “the finest moments are when we meet God as martyrs for al-Aqsa,” the mosque at the center of the violence currently shaking Israel and the West Bank. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the Islamic Movement of northern Israel outlawed and its funds frozen. The northern branch, which Salah heads, is considered particularly confrontational. Netanyahu has charged that its leaders, such as Salah, are the primary instigators behind the current wave of knife attacks and bloody riots — guilty, he says, of spreading lies about Israel’s true intentions toward Muslim holy places. Netanyahu’s offensive is being met with open defiance by the Muslim sheiks leading the movement, who continue to insist that Israel is trying to change the delicate status quo at al-Aqsa Mosque in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City. “This mosque is ours and ours alone,” Sheik Kamal Khatib, deputy director of the Islamic Movement in Israel, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “If Netanyahu continues his provocations, he will ignite a religious war, and I promise he will be burned by it.” [No end to Israeli-Palestinian violence despite Kerry proposal] The continuing antagonism comes just days after Secretary of State John F. Kerry came to the region to try to dampen the flames. Attacks continued Tuesday, first as two Palestinian assailants tried to stab an Israeli man near the Jewish settlements in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank, and later when a Palestinian attempted to stab a soldier in Hebron. Each attacker was shot dead at the scene, police said. The Islamic Movement’s leaders are Israeli citizens and so cannot be taken before secretive tribunals in military courts, as Palestinians in the West Bank can. The movement’s stated objective is to kindle a more fundamentalist Islam; it has the support of Arab Israeli politicians. “The Islamic Movement is part of the political scene and it is a legitimate movement, and it should not be outlawed,” said Ahmad Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Israeli parliament. “Netanyahu is looking for a victim, and the Islamic Movement is a target,” he said. “The Islamic Movement has the right to defend holy places.” Yet Israeli critics, including some Arab Israelis, say the group is at best a soft front for the Islamist militant movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and shares its roots as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some critics charge that the Islamic Movement is a kind of fifth column for extremist ideology allowed to smolder in the Jewish state. “This is the Israeli branch of the Islamic State; this is ISIS in Israel,” said Mordechai Kedar, a former Israeli military intelligence commander and now a researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. “They are waging jihad against Israel. Of course, jihad according to their means and what they can do inside Israel,” Kedar said. “They are growing in strength because they are attractive — not to everyone, many do not like them, but it is enough if 1 in 10 Muslims are attracted,” he said. “They have schools, kindergartens, libraries, clinics. They give people jobs. They take people to the mosque. Their appeal is quite broad,” said Awawdeh Shukri, an Arab physician in Kafr Kanna, a Galilee village whose politics, he said, “are 180 degrees different.” Shukri branded the group “radicals.” The doctor said the Islamic Movement thrived because the Israeli government was purposefully underserving Arab Israelis. Arab Muslims and Christians make up more than 20 percent of the Israeli population but often say they are treated as second-class citizens. For years, leaders of the Islamic Movement in Israel have made al-Aqsa Mosque their rallying point, and right-wing Israeli ministers and Muslim clerics this week both stoked the conflict. Muslims refer to the raised esplanade that includes the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque as the Noble Sanctuary and believe it is where the prophet Muhammad launched his night journey to heaven. Jews call it the Temple Mount, the site of their two destroyed temples, the center for their faith and their people. Both faiths revere the site. [Israel outlaws Muslim civilian guards at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque] Over the weekend, Israel and Jordan agreed to take steps aimed at quelling the current wave of Palestinian attacks and tough Israeli countermeasures, starting with the installation of security cameras on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, in an unwritten accord brokered by Kerry. Netanyahu blames the Islamists for spreading propaganda that Israel intends to change the delicate status quo at the mosque compound, which was taken by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Netanyahu has repeatedly asserted that Israel will honor the current arrangement — that only Muslims may pray at the site, while tourists, including devout Jews, can visit but not pray. Jews dressed in obviously religious garb, and usually known to Israeli police as activists, are allowed on the site but are escorted by armed Israeli security forces, which has provoked Muslim guardians to surround the Jews and Israeli politicians and repeatedly shout “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great.” Israeli officials say the guardians are paid. In the interview, Sheik Khatib dodged the question of payment. “We don’t deny that we call for ordinary peaceful Muslims to go and pray at the mosque and protect it. And yes, we provide buses,” he said. The prime minister’s assertions that Israel does not intend to change the status quo were undermined Monday when the country’s top diplomat, Tzipi Hotovely, who serves as deputy foreign minister, announced, “My dream is to see the Israeli flag flying over the Temple Mount,” and called on the government to renounce the status quo and allow Jews to go to the site to pray. “It’s the holiest place for the Jewish people,” Hotovely said. She also appeared to suggest that Muslims would raise an Islamic State flag at the site. In a tweet, Netanyahu warned his ministers to “act accordingly.” An Israeli parliamentarian in the opposition, Yoel Hasson, called on Netanyahu to fire Hotovely. “With the consistency and stubbornness of a mule, the messianic deputy foreign minister Hotovely fans the flames of incitement in the entire Middle East,” he said. Hotovely backed down somewhat, saying, “My personal opinions are not government policy.” Meanwhile, the Islamic Movement sheiks dared Israel to ban their organization. Khatib, the group’s deputy, asserted that Jews have no rights to the Temple Mount and said that it was unlikely there were ever temples on the location, despite near-universal agreement among archaeologists and historians that there were. “There will never be a so-called third temple there,” Khatib said. “This is our creed.” Read more Israeli and Palestinian doctors work together to heal wounds of conflict What drives the Palestinians who attack Jews with kitchen knives? Palestinian protesters set fire to a Jewish holy shrine in the West Bank |