Ahmed Abu Halabiya is an Imam appointed and funded by the late Yasser Arafat. He is a member of the Palestinian Authority’s “Fatwa Council,” and is a former rector of the Islamic University in Gaza. Typical of his fiery rhetoric are these words, which he recently delivered from a mosque pulpit during a sermon that was broadcast on Palestinian state television:

“The Jews … do not have any moderates or any advocates of peace. They are all liars. They all want to distort truth, but we are in possession of the truth. . . . O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists – are the Jews, who have butchered our children, orphaned them, widowed our women and desecrated our holy places and sacred sites. They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: ‘Fight them.’ Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the believers…. Allah the almighty has called upon us not to ally with the Jews or the Christians, not to like them, not to become their partners, not to support them, and not to sign agreements with them…. Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them — and those who stand by them — they are all in one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims – because they established Israel here, in the beating heart of the Arab world, in Palestine. They created it to be the outpost of their civilization — and the vanguard of their army, and to be the sword of the West and the crusaders, hanging over the necks of the monotheists, the Muslims in these lands…. Let us put our trust in Allah, close ranks, and unite our words, and the slogan of us all should be, ‘Jihad! Jihad! For the sake of Palestine, and for the sake of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa!’ … We will not give up a single grain of soil of Palestine.”