On 16 February 2024, Israel’s Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Idit Rosenzweig-Abu posted a tweet to let the world know that she was:
Absolutely horrified to discover that in Brussels Parliament, an invited Muslim preacher chose to recite parts of Surah “Al-Ahzab”, a Surah about a battle between Muslims and Jews. This is a Surah that explicitly (verse 26) calls for the KILLING and TAKING CAPTIVE of Jews! In these words!
Source: https://twitter.com/IditAbu/status/1758596558025626012 (archived here as an image, embedded below as a tweet)
The trusty Shabbat Department of the Jerusalem Post was right on it
The Jerusalem Post rolled with it in an article today (17 February 2024), “Imam recites Quran at Belgian parliament, calls for killing, kidnapping of Jews” bylined by “Jerusalem Post Staff” (archived here and here). The Post wrote:
An Imam at the Belgian parliament last week began reciting a verse from the Quran that explicitly calls on Muslims to kill and take Jews captive.
The Quran excerpt is verse 33:26 from the Al-Ahzab Surah (chapter). It translates to, “ And He brought down those from the People of the Book who supported the enemy alliance from their own strongholds, and cast horror into their hearts. You ‘believers’ killed some, and took others captive.”
Within the Quran, Jews are referred to as the “People of the Book.”
Before we start, it is worth noting that “The People of the Book” is a Muslim term for both Christians and Jews, not just Jews. In the verse cited, it is used as a partial descriptor of a specific historical group of Jews regarding a specific historical event. More on that below.
Note also in the above text from that the Jerusalem Post reports that the Imam “began reciting a verse from the Quran that explicitly calls on Muslims to kill and take Jews captive”. The Post explicitly reported that the Imam himself read verse 33:26 in the Belgian Parliament. The article leaves no room for doubt that this event happened.
Video evidence: The Imam did not quote Sura 33:26
I don’t really know how else to say this but the brief Qu’ranic recitation by Qari Muhammad Ansar Norani never once mentions verse 33:26 but instead is comprised of verses 33:46-47 and concludes with a benign, standard sign-off, “Allah almighty has spoken the truth!”
Here is the very same video that both the Israeli ambassador and the Jerusalem Post posted online, with added English subtitles:
The video above that Israel’s Ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg, Idit Rosenzweig-Abu, herself posted makes it crystal clear that the Imam is not reciting verse 33:26.
To it’s shame, The Jerusalem Post story embedded the same video that the Ambassador had shared, without realizing that anyone who can understand Arabic can now see for themselves what the froth is all about.
The clever Israeli ambassador
Now that you’ve gleaned from watching the video that the words are just generic blessings, notice that the clever Israeli Ambassador never actually states directly in her tweet that the Imam recited verse 33:26 but instead worded it as follows:
“an invited Muslim preacher chose to recite parts of Surah ‘Al-Ahzab’, a Surah about a battle between Muslims and Jews. This is a Surah that explicitly (verse 26) calls for the KILLING and TAKING CAPTIVE of Jews!”
That wasn’t the verse he read. What is the Ambassador saying? That the Imam’s reading of two specific verses in the Qu’ran is ‘basically the same’ as if he had read a completely different verse, for the sole reason that both verses happen to be located in the same chapter?
The Israeli ambassador remains the only person to quote Sura 33:26 and she alone has associated the verse with the Imam.
Ambassador Rosenzweig-Abu additionally spouted outrage that this call (that in reality had never happened) could happen from such a symbolic locale:
“He could have chosen anything else. A frightening symbolic message to anyone who knows the Quran, straight from the parliament podium.”
He quite literally did choose something else.
The only ‘fear’ here is the fear the Israeli ambassador aims to spread from her Twitter podium, in her official capacity as a diplomatic representative of Israel. This kind of Israeli propaganda relies on a lack of knowledge about Islam and Muslims, and plays on widely-held Islamophobic assumptions and demonizations, to make you take claims like the Israeli ambassador’s at face value.
Even the Jerusalem Post itself was fooled by the ambassador’s clever phrasing and, going one step further, went on record in the opening sentence of its article to claim that the Imam had actually read that specific verse:
An Imam at the Belgian parliament last week began reciting a verse from the Quran that explicitly calls on Muslims to kill and take Jews captive.
Again. What were the actual verses being recited in the video the Ambassador and The Jerusalem Post shared?
The two verses that Qari Muhammad Ansar Norani recites from the Qu’ran are Sura 33:46…
وَدَاعِيًا إِلَى ٱللَّهِ بِإِذْنِهِۦ وَسِرَاجًۭا مُّنِيرًۭا
(“and a caller to ˹the Way of˺ Allah by His command, and a beacon of light.”)
…and Sura 33:47:
وَبَشِّرِ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ بِأَنَّ لَهُم مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ فَضْلًۭا كَبِيرًۭا
(“Give good news to the believers that they will have a great bounty from Allah.”)
The Israeli ambassador twisted the Qu’ran to demonize Muslims
Not content with merely inserting words in the Imam’s mouth that he didn’t speak, the Israeli ambassador subsequently both misinterpreted and misrepresented Sura 33:26 as ‘a call for genocide and kidnapping’.
The specific conflict which is the historical context of Sura 33—titled “Al-Ahzab” (“ٱلْأَحْزَابَ” or “the Confederates”)—makes for an interesting read. Of course it contains nothing simplistic, racist, or violent as her misquotes and misrepresentations suggest.
Sura 33:26 says, “And He brought down those from the People of the Book who supported the enemy alliance from their own strongholds, and cast horror into their hearts. You ˹believers˺ killed some, and took others captive.”
It is obvious that Mohammed is describing killing and capturing the enemy in the past tense (“killed…took”). He is talking in the past tense because he is describing a past historical battle against a specific group of traitorous “Confederates”, the Jews of Banu Quraiẓah, who had broken a specific treaty they had with the Prophet by actively assisting Mohammed’s enemies to wage war against him.
There is no way this verse can be interpreted as a universal call for the genocide of all Jews.
Since October 7, we have seen Zionists relentlessly deploying what I have been calling ‘misdefinition tropes’. Complete lies such as the assertion that standard struggle terminology or simple demands for freedom are instead are ‘calls for genocide’.
Two common examples of these misdefinition tropes are the word “Intifada” (in Arabic a “shaking off” as in ‘shaking off the chains of oppression’, best translated as “Uprising” in English) and the protest chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Zionists have tried to get the idea to catch on that these words are really coded ‘calls for genocide’.
The Jerusalem Post. Again.
The Jerusalem Post doesn’t have one Arabic speaker? Not one? Is this just bad reporting, or is it an intentional act by the newspaper to actively spread demonization propaganda and undermine European relationships with the Arab and Muslim world, shutting down any expressions of solidarity with Palestinians by inferring antisemetic motives?
Let’s assume the first. This latest journalism catastrophe by the Jerusalem Post is comparable to that time it reported on 1 December 2023, with a straight face, that a dead Gazan baby was in fact a ‘rubber doll’ and that video of the devastated relatives holding her corpse was a “Pallywood” production, Israel’s favorite phrase to delegitimize vile things it actually did by claiming visual evidence is just a Palestinian studio video production.
I wonder if Danielle Greyman-Kennard, the perpetrator of the doll story (which was quickly taken down by the former Jerusalem Post editor, who blamed his weekend holiday for not doing his editor’s job for him) is also one of the “Jerusalem Post Staff” pseudonymously credited with this fiction?
Time will reveal all. The Jerusalem Post’s new Editor-in-chief is Zvika Klein (“צביקה קליין”).
They’ve already changed the headline once since I began writing this:
Original headline (updated 8:23pm):
New headline (updated 10:48pm).
Note the subtle change from the original (“call”) that implied that the Iman directly made a call for violence to the now more ambiguous “calling”, as if it was maybe the Qu’ran saying this. Both are incorrect and the unambiguous first line in the article remains unchanged.
The Jerusalem Post doubles down, publishing a second article based on the lie (18 February 2024)
Michael Starr, the Diaspora affairs correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, “covering global Jewish affairs, antisemitism, and radical anti-Israel activities” doubled down on the lie the following day, in the 18 February 2024 Jerusalem Post. These people have no shame:
Radical Islam is running rampant in Belgium as the European country takes a pro-Hamas and anti-Israel stance, Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli told The Jerusalem Post on Saturday night in response to an imam reciting a Quranic verse about warfare and captive-taking in the Belgian parliament on Tuesday.
Source: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-787471
Scottish OG from the time of the First Intifada and the birth of the international movement of solidarity with the Palestinian people • Former Friends of Birzeit University Coordinator • Birzeit University Public Relations Officer • Cofounder and Editor of the original Electronic Intifada website • Creator of countless websites for pro-Palestinian organizations around the world via nigelparry.net
