Muslim American Society Splinter Group - Muslim Americans for Palestine [MAP] - Adopts Radical Palestinian Viewpoint

Muslim American Society Splinter Group - Muslim Americans for Palestine [MAP] - Adopts Radical Palestinian Viewpoint

February 24, 2010 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - According to widely accepted terror authority Steven Emerson's, Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Muslim American Society is closely tied to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood:

"The Muslim American Society (MAS) is an organization with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood...The Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banya in 1928, has provided the ideological underpinning for almost all modern Sunni Islamic terrorist groups..." [source, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/44.pdf]

Given this degree of closeness, MAS' breast-beating claims of moderation ring hollow, so it is not surprising that its sister youth group, Muslim Americans for Palestine, would embody the same level of animus towards the West and especially towards Israel.

From the MAP website, "Muslim Americans for Palestine (MAP), a Project of the Muslim American Society (MAS) was established in 2009 to be a source of accurate information to the public at large, to repel and challenge propaganda and discrimination against Palestinians and to bond our community with the significance of Palestine in Islam." [source, http://www.mapalestine.org/home.html]

If MAP's recent convention was as described by Susan Schwartz writing for the Muslim Media Network [see, http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=5611] then the group is simply another Jew bashing operation led by immoderate Muslims.

As Ms. Schwartz notes, a statement by MAP speaker Reem Salahi claimed she "...spoke of "white flag murders", that is the murder by Israelis of innocent civilians whom they had ordered out of their homes and who had complied and exited waving white flags. In at least six incidents the Israelis shot them in cold blood."

Such assertions are part and parcel of radical Palestinian politics as is absurd notion that Muslims somehow have a legitimate claim - trumping Israel's - to Jerusalem, a city they have renamed al-Quds.

On that subject we refer to Daniel Pipes' excellent 2001 treatise in the Middle East Quarterly - The Muslim Claim to Jerusalem [http://www.meforum.org/490/the-muslim-claim-to-jerusalem].

Pipes quickly established the multi-thousand year hold that the Jewish nation has on the ancient city.

"The Jewish connection to Jerusalem is an ancient and powerful one. Judaism made Jerusalem a holy city over three thousand years ago and through all that time Jews remained steadfast to it. Jews pray in its direction, mention its name constantly in prayers, close the Passover service with the wistful statement "Next year in Jerusalem," and recall the city in the blessing at the end of each meal...in addition, Jerusalem has had a prominent historical role, is the only capital of a Jewish state, and is the only city with a Jewish majority during the whole of the past century. In the words of its current mayor, Jerusalem represents "the purist expression of all that Jews prayed for, dreamed of, cried for, and died for in the two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple."[source, ibid]

Likewise Muslim counter-claims are dealt with rather harshly.

"...Jerusalem appears in the Jewish Bible 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem, sometimes the Land of Israel) 154 times, or 823 times in all. The Christian Bible mentions Jerusalem 154 times and Zion 7 times. In contrast, the columnist Moshe Kohn notes, Jerusalem and Zion appear as frequently in the Qur'an "as they do in the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, the Taoist Tao-Te Ching, the Buddhist Dhamapada and the Zoroastrian Zend Avesta" - which is to say, not once..." [source, ibid]

This prompts the obvious question of why Jerusalem, "...being of such evidently minor religious importance, why does it now loom so large for Muslims?"

The answer being, "Politics, not religious sensibility, has fueled the Muslim attachment to Jerusalem for nearly fourteen centuries; what the historian Bernard Wasserstein has written about the growth of Muslim feeling in the course of the Countercrusade applies through the centuries: "often in the history of Jerusalem, heightened religious fervour may be explained in large part by political necessity."104 This pattern has three main implications. First, Jerusalem will never be more than a secondary city for Muslims; "belief in the sanctity of Jerusalem," Sivan rightly concludes, "cannot be said to have been widely diffused nor deeply rooted in Islam..." [source, ibid ]

It seems that MAP, like MAS will continue to advance ill disguised anti-Jewish falsehoods based upon what they judge to be political exigencies despite the reality that such claims fail to hold in the crucible of truth.

©2010 PipeLineNews.org LLC. All rights reserved. Research provided by Beila Rabinowitz.