The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported Friday that the Muslim American Society Islamic Center in Philadelphia (MAS Philly) had uploaded a video of children wearing Palestinian attire and singing jihadist songs.
The video, which was uploaded to the center’s Facebook page on April 22, appears to be one of several videos uploaded in celebration of “Ummah Day.” (The word “ummah” refers to the worldwide Muslim community.) The center uploaded several other videos to its Facebook page, each featuring children making presentations that represented other Muslim countries. However, the Palestinian video now appears to have been deleted.
In the video, which MEMRI reposted with subtitles, the children are shown singing jihadist or terrorist songs, praising the “blood of martyrs,” a reference to suicide bombing. They also sing “Our Palestine must return to us,” and recite speeches praising suicide bombers: “They compete with one another to reach Paradise.” They add: “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque … and we will subject them to eternal torture.” One child wears a t-shirt showing a map of Palestine on which Israel has been eliminated.
Such videos of children pledging their loyalty to terrorism are common on Palestinian television, particularly but not exclusively in Gaza, which is run by the Hamas terrorist group. Other Palestinian Authority publications extol the virtues of terror; to this day, the Palestinian government pays stipends to jailed terrorists and the families of dead ones.
In a statement posted to the MAS Philly Facebook page Saturday, the center said “not all songs were properly vetted.” It added: “This was an unintended mistake and an oversight in which the center and the students are remorseful.” Later, it also posted a statement from the Pennsylvania chapter of the Council on Islamic Relations (CAIR), in which the organization “reaffirmed its condemnation of any and all manifestations of anti-Semitism.”
As Breitbart News has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization . The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
The CAIR-Pennsylvania statement did not condemn the MAS Philly video. Instead, it used the opportunity to criticize Israel: “We should be careful, however, not to conflate criticism of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians with anti-Semitism.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Photo: file
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