A Christian Palestinian urged Muslim Canadians to wage war on the Jewish State of Israel. And he did this by invoking a verse from my holy book — the Qur’an — at a political rally in the shadows of the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park last Saturday.
Speaking before hundreds of demonstrators at the annual Al-Quds rally, Elias Hazineh read the following verse from the Holy Qur’an:
“And prepare against them (non-Muslims)
Your strength to the utmost
Of your power including
Steeds of war to strike terror
Into the hearts of the enemies.”
— The Qur’an, Verse 60, Chapter eight, ‘The Spoils of War’
Hazineh is prominent member of the community. A one-time Executive Assistant to former Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish and later Liberal MP Omar Alghabra (and adviser to Justin Trudeau), Hazineh is an articulate and a reasoned person to engage with. When he took on Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion, accusing her of a conflict of interest, he won the respect of many for the risks he took bringing the case forward.
Last week however, Hazineh fell prey to unnecessary vitriol. He told the Al-Quds Day rally: “We have to give them (Jews) an ultimatum. You have to leave Jerusalem. You have to leave Palestine.”
Hazineh then went on to denounce the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians currently underway in Washington DC between Tzvi Lipni of Israel and Saeb Erakat representing the Palestinians, instead urging the men and boys at the rally to wage war:
“We (Palestinians) have been negotiating with them (Israel) for 65 years. We say, get out or you’re dead! We give them two minutes and then we start shooting. And that’s the only way that they will understand.”
I have known Elias Hazineh as a friend, and despite our differences of opinion, I have always found him to be a secular person, above the divides of religion and race. So his dipping into the Qur’an to justify killing Jews has been a personal shock to many like me who support the end of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the creation of a secular Palestinian State next door to Israel.
Christians as a community have suffered immensely at the hands of Islamists. To hear a Christian invoke the Qur’an to justify Islamic war against non-Muslims is truly bizarre.
From Egypt to Bangladesh, many liberal and secular Muslims have fought hard to keep Islam out of the political discourse. At great risk to ourselves and our families we have stood up to defend the rights of Christian minorities, only to now hear a Christian on the side of the jihadis.
Al-Quds Day was not initiated by Palestinians or by Arabs, or even the Saudi-led Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC). It was a stunt created by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 as a means of distracting his countrymen’s attention from the slaughter he had commissioned inside Iran and to marginalize Palestine’s secular nationalist leaders. He sowed the seeds that later gave rise to Hamas and Hezbollah.
Today, it’s a shame that the very Palestinians Ayatollah Khomeini sought to take out of the equation, men like Elias Hazineh, have climbed on to the Iranian bandwagon.
My advice to Hazineh: Next time you wish to invoke a religious text to sow hatred against Jews, try your own holy books; spare the Qur’an, please. Better yet, just don’t do it at all.
With friends like Ayatollah Khomeini, the Palestinians need no enemies.
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