“Anyone who seeks to draw a connection between my innocent remarks and the entirely legitimate efforts of my people to rid the land of Jews who think they can just be sovereign, and not dhimmi, the way history intended, is either mistaken or malicious.”
Lod, November 30 – An Arab-Israeli legislator who faced backlash for using inflammatory language spoke out in his own defense today, accusing his critics of deliberate distortion of his rhetoric urging constituents to perpetrate physical harm against Jews to mean he endorses causing such physical harm to Jews, when in fact his intent was causing physical harm to Jews.
MK Sami Abu Shehadeh of the Balad Party sought to clarify remarks he made a mosque in the troubled city of Lod several weeks ago, during which he praised local Arab residents for “breaking the nose” of Jews during riots that resulted in extensive property damage to Jewish homes, cars, businesses, and community institutions such as synagogues. He charged in an interview today (Sunday) that tendentious coverage of his speech aims to paint his metaphorical statement as glorifying or endorsing violence against Jews, while the actual message he sought to convey was glorifying or endorsing violence against Jews. Abu Shehadeh provided his clarification during a discussion of the terrorist attack near the Temple Mount this morning, in which a Hamas member shot four Jews, one of them fatally, and an accomplice attempted a stabbing. Preachers in the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Mount frequently incite or praise violence against Jews, as well.
“The notion that I call for violence against Jews is a racist convolution,” he insisted. “I merely praised the youths who burned, pillaged, destroyed, vandalized, beat and otherwise terrorized their Jewish neighbors during the disturbances several months ago. Anyone who seeks to draw a connection between my innocent remarks and the entirely legitimate efforts of my people to rid the land of Jews who think they can just be sovereign, and not dhimmi, the way history intended, is either mistaken or malicious.”
Shehadeh called the development a piece of a larger phenomenon, in which calls for pushing the Jews into the sea gets twisted in Israeli media and hasbara reporting as calls for a genocide of the Jews living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, when the true intent of the phrase points only to a genocide of the Jews living between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. “These distortions must stop,” he argued. “Honest coverage of our rhetoric is the only way to establish and nurture reconciliation and a shared geographical and cultural space in this land, where Arabs belong and Jews are at most barely-tolerated interlopers who deserve all the abuse we can hurl at them.”
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