John Kerry, and Lame Duck POTUS Barack Obama, who have shamefully rationalized U.S. failure to veto an odious U.N. resolution condemning Israel’s legal right to build settlements in its ancestral homeland should consider two complementary fatwas, one written January 5, 1956, by then grand mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Hasan Ma’moun, and another January 9, 1956, signed by the leading members of the Fatwa Committee of Al Azhar University—Sunni Islam’s Vatican—and the major representatives of all four Sunni Islamic schools of jurisprudence. I elucidated the gist of those simultaneous fatwas in a one minute clip from a December 27, 2016 interview with Tom Trento, embedded below:
These rulings elaborated the following key initial point: that all of historical Palestine—modern Jordan, Israel, and the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, as well as Gaza—having been conquered by jihad, was a permanent possession of the global Muslim umma (community), “fay territory”—booty or spoils—to be governed eternally by Islamic law.
Muslims cannot conclude peace with those Jews who have usurped the territory of Palestine and attacked its people and their property in any manner which allows the Jews to continue as a state in that sacred Muslim territory. [As] Jews have taken a part of Palestine and there established their non-Islamic government and have also evacuated from that part most of its Muslim inhabitants. . . . Jihad . . . to restore the country to its people . . . is the duty of all Muslims, not just those who can undertake it. And since all Islamic countries constitute the abode of every Muslim, the Jihad is imperative for both the Muslims inhabiting the territory attacked, and Muslims everywhere else because even though some sections have not been attacked directly, the attack nevertheless took place on a part of the Muslim territory which is a legitimate residence for any Muslim… Everyone knows that from the early days of Islam to the present day the Jews have been plotting against Islam and Muslims and the Islamic homeland. They do not propose to be content with the attack they made on Palestine and Al Aqsa Mosque, but they plan for the possession of all Islamic territories from the Nile to the Euphrates.
Although free of eschatological references, i.e., that Jews, per the prophet of Islam, Muhammad’s diktat in the “traditions” of the creed (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985), must be annihilated to usher in Islam’s “messianic age,” the January 1956 Al Azhar fatwas’ language and arguments—pronounced from Sunni Islam’s most esteemed religious teaching institution—are otherwise indistinguishable from those employed just over three decades later by Hamas (in its 1988 covenant), revealing the same conjoined motivations of jihad, and conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred.
Recent polling data indicate that these traditionalist Islamic views—espoused, in our era, across a continuum of 61 years by Al Azhar University, and Hamas—resonate with the Palestinian Muslim population. American pollster Stanley Greenberg performed what was described as an “intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” As reported in July, 2011 these data revealed that seventy-three percent of Palestinian Muslims agreed with the dictates of the apocalyptic hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985; included in the 1988 Hamas Covenant, and repeated in 2012 by the “moderate” Palestinian Authority Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who serves under “moderate” PA “President” [For Life?]Mahmoud Abbas) calling for the annihilation of the Jews, to bring on the messianic age. Eighty percent supported the destruction of Israel by jihad, and the need to recruit the entire global Muslim community, or “umma” in this quintessential Islamic cause.
Israel re-settling its ancient homelands in Judea-Samaria, in full accord with the post-World War I League of Nations Mandate for Palestine—all of it—being a recognized homeland for the Jews, is no “obstacle” to a “peace” never obtained despite two existing Sharia states in 80% of that Mandate, i.e., Jordan (78% of it), and Gaza/Hamastan (another 2% of it). The annihilationist jihadism and conjoined Islamic Jew-hatred of so-called Palestinian Muslims, and the global Muslim umma, sanctioned by Islam’s highest religious authorities, including the Al-Azhar “spiritual” leaders of Sunni Islam, remain the true obstacle to just peace.
