Why did so many people spread and probably invent these fake social media posts? Because they wanted to believe that Muslim religious leaders would condemn Hamas mocking the bodies of the Jewish children it murdered and there was still some hope for decency left in the world.
But those condemnations don’t exist.
The only official statements out of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were vocal condemnations of Israel and proposals for an ‘alternative plan’ that would leave the PLO and Hamas in power under a fake ‘front government’ of technocrats.
Ahmed Al Yamahi, the UAE appointed ‘president’ of the Arab Parliament, accused Israel of a “genocidal war in Gaza” “unequivocally placed the blame for this escalation on the Israeli occupation authorities,” urged the UN to “hold the Israeli government and its settlers accountable for their crimes and violations against the Palestinian people” and called for Arab unity to support the ‘Palestinian’ cause.
And unlike the fake grand mufti quotes, these were published directly on government sites.
The Saudi and UAE governments issued statements condemning terrorist attacks in their own countries and even some abroad, and many condemnations of Israel, none of Hamas for its treatment of the Bibas children.
Coverage in state-owned media outlets sometimes reads like outright Hamas propaganda.
A story in Al-Bayan, a Dubai state-owned media outlet, described Hamas as having “handed over the bodies of four Israeli prisoners” while falsely claiming that they were “killed in deliberate Israeli airstrikes designed to kill them”.
Al-Bayan used the term ‘Asra’ to refer to the murdered children, which in Arabic tends to refer to ‘prisoners of war’ as in Koran 8:67: “It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war (and free them with ransom) until he had made a great slaughter (among his enemies) in the land.”
The UAE offered an initial condemnation of the Oct 7 attacks followed by a long string of condemnations of Israel throughout the war including support for war crimes charges.
The unfortunate truth is that there is very little opposition to Muslim terrorism unless it’s directed at fellow Muslims. ISIS has the highest margin of Muslim opposition not because it burned people alive and raped little girls, but because it declared a caliphate and treated all Muslims who refused to acknowledge its supremacy as heretics and infidels. Al Qaeda enjoyed wide support in the Muslim world when it was flying planes into skyscrapers, but once it bombed a hotel wedding in Jordan and began a civil war in Iraq, its popularity diminished among Muslims.
The UAE turned on the Muslim Brotherhood after it plotted to seize power. The Saudis joined the crackdown on the Brotherhood a year later. But a few years before all this, there had been an uproar over the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
The Saudis and the UAE distrust Hamas because of its sponsorship by their enemies, Qatar and Iran, and its origins as a Muslim Brotherhood organization, but their objections have nothing to do with its killing of Israelis of whatever age or opposition to terrorism as a general principle.
After the atrocities of Oct 7, Saudi approval ratings for Hamas rose from 10% to 40%. 95% of Saudis polled did not believe that Hamas had killed civilians. The vast majority of Saudis opposed improving relations with Israel and believed that it would eventually be destroyed.
Expecting the Grand Mufti to condemn Hamas is a fantasy. As is Saudi normalization.
The Abraham Accords is, at best, a regional alliance against common enemies in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and not based on a deeper friendship or a recognition of mutual humanity. Those desperate to believe otherwise have been forced to invent fake condemnations to substitute for the real ones that should have been issued but weren’t and never will be.
Americans and Israelis have spent too long living in a fantasy world when it comes to peace in the Middle East. Fake quotes are no substitute for dealing with the reality of Islamic terrorism.
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