End Time Persecution

They hate Christians, too

For more information, visit the Middle East Media Research Institute at: www.memri.org

The government-run TV station in Yemen is broadcasting prayer sermons at which Muslim preachers call for the destruction of Christians and their supporters and followers, along with Jews and their supporters. The Arab nation of Qatar, in the Persian Gulf, joins Yemen as part of a growing number of Arab nations broadcasting messages of hate against Americans, Christians, and Jews.

Last month, Qatari TV broadcast sermons at which preachers denounced "vile Christians" and beseeched Allah to annihilate them, pleading,

The Qatari broadcast came days after another broadcast in which a sheikh said Jews were "grandsons of monkeys and pigs." Saudi Arabian television also has repeatedly broadcast vicious anti-Semitic diatribes, reminiscent of Nazi-era propaganda.

The fact that America's Arab allies often express their hatred for Jews in ways that would make even the most stolid of State Department bureaucrats blush no longer seems to qualify as earth-shattering news.

Calls for waging holy war against Israel, combined with anti-Semitic rantings reminiscent of the Middle Ages, have become all too common in so-called moderate Arab countries ranging from Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

But just in case you thought that America's ostensible Arab partners in the war on terror reserved their nastiest vitriol exclusively for the Children of Israel, consider some of the following recent observations they have made about Christians.

This past Friday Yemen's government-run television station broadcast a prayer sermon delivered at the Grand Mosque in Sanaa, Yemen's capital. Here is what the preacher had to say,

This marked the third week in a row that official Yemeni TV had broadcast a sermon in which the preacher issued a chilling, and decidedly unpleasant, call for the destruction of both Jews and Christians.

One would never know from such rhetoric that America has gone to great lengths to assist Yemen's government in combating Islamic terror groups operating in their territory. Isn't it nice to see just how much the Yemeni government appreciates all that help? Arab states in the Gulf region, which stand to gain the most from America's impending removal of Saddam Hussein, are likewise just as grateful as their Yemeni neighbors. Take, for instance, the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, where a massive American military base is being built in preparation for the war on Iraq, as the New York Times reported on August 19.

Earlier this month, in a Friday prayer sermon broadcast live on official Qatari TV from the Omar Bin-Khattab Mosque in Doha, the preacher denounced what he termed the "vile Christians" and pleaded with Allah to annihilate them:

And so, just a few weeks shy of the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Qatar's government apparently sees nothing wrong with televising a call to destroy Jews and Christians.

Nor, it seems, does Qatar hesitate to invoke the most abhorrent of anti-Semitic imagery in its denunciations of Jews. On August 16, Qatari television's dose of religious inspiration for its viewers included a sermon delivered by one Sheikh Dr. Anwar al-Badawi, in which he referred to Jews as "grandsons of monkeys and pigs" and said they were "filthy."

In nearby Saudi Arabia, the same government-run hate machine that produced 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers continues to spew out similar venom. A recent homily screened on the official Saudi TV1 network included the following: "O Allah, destroy the tyrant Jews for they are within your power." Given the government's tight control of the media, these hateful messages are the undeniable responsibility of their leaders, the very same leaders now being courted by the US State Department in the hopes they will participate in the war on terror.

And, even though these Arab leaders know quite well that the US government, through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, carefully monitors what their media say and how they say it, they do not seem to fear any political or diplomatic backlash over their calls for mass murder.

And why should they? After all, rather than confronting Arab leaders about these issues, America's diplomats prefer to look the other way, ignoring the problem in the hope that perhaps no one will notice.

It is therefore time for the US Congress to step in and take notice. America's legislators should require the State Department to compile and issue a quarterly report on anti-American and anti-Israel invective in the Arab press, one that documents the phenomenon in a comprehensive and systematic manner.

Such a report would serve two essential purposes: it would raise public awareness about what the Arab states really think of America and Israel, and it would also mark an important first step in highlighting and countering the official hatemongering that takes place so brazenly throughout the Arab world.

For, as the events of the past year have made abundantly clear, the danger of rabid anti-Western rhetoric in the Arab world is neither latent nor negligible. When they say they are out to kill Christians and Jews, policymakers need to start taking them at their word.