The PLO sees Jews visiting the Temple Mount—Judaism’s holiest site—as similar to Muslims massacring Christians in churches in Sri Lanka during Easter.
The Palestinian National Council—the PLO’s legislative body—has compared “the deviant ideology” behind the murder of hundreds of Christians by Muslims in suicide bombings in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday to “the ideology that causes settlers to break into the blessed Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem."In a strategy aimed at keeping Jews away from the Temple Mount, the Palestinian Authority and its leaders have declared the entire Temple Mount part of the Al-Aqsa mosque and exclusively an Islamic site. They vilify any presence of Jews on the mount as a “desecration,” “defilement,” “break-in” or “invasion” of the mosque.
It is this ideology that is behind the recent, odious comparison.
The PNC described the attacks in Sri Lanka as “immoral and contrary to religious and human values,” and similar to the ideology that leads Jewish “settlers” to “break in” to the Al-Aqsa mosque: “The deviant ideology that caused these people to commit their despicable crime against the churches in Sri Lanka is the same ideology that causes settlers to break into the blessed Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, do as they please with it, attack the Muslim worshipers, and prevent them from worshiping freely during the Hebrew Passover holiday [a reference to West Bank and Gaza Strip crossings being closed during the holiday due to security concerns].” (Official P.A. daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 22, 2019).
The comparison is even more repugnant considering the P.A. and Fatah’s reactions to the slaughter of four Jews praying in the Har Nof synagogue in Jerusalem in 2014. Although the PA officially condemned it, P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas’s adviser called the murders a “heroic operation” and “blessed” the terrorists’ weapons—“your kitchen knives and axes"—while Fatah “welcomed the operation” and “escorted” the terrorist “martyrs” to “paradise."Another hateful comparison was made in an op-ed in the official P.A. daily, which stated that the fire that devastated the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris earlier this month was similar to the “daily Zionist invasions that desecrate” the Al-Aqsa mosque:
“The fire in the historic Notre Dame Cathedral ... brings something else to mind—the blessed Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place for Islam and the First Direction of Prayer, is being subjected to fire, daily Zionist invasions that desecrate it, and excavations under and around it that are exposing it to direct daily destruction and danger.” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 21, 2019.)
Palestinian Media Watch has documented Abbas likewise saying that Jews defile the Al-Aksa mosque, although he recently pretended to American students to embrace Jews’ rights to perform religious rituals anywhere. You can read the full report on the Palestinian Media Watch website.
