'Jihad in Jerusalem'

Palestinian Authority Religious Affairs Minister calls for Jihad to move from Syria to Jerusalem in speech; Abbas applauds.

By Tova Dvorin

First Publish: 1/14/2014, 7:03 PM

Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Religious Affairs Mahmoud Al-Habash claimed Monday that Jihad fighters should not flock to Syria, but to Jerusalem - and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas applauded, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).
"Whoever wants resistance, whoever wants Jihad, the direction for Jihad is well-known and clear," Al-Habash claimed to a crowd at a PA-sponsored event. "Those who send young people to Syria or elsewhere to die for a misdirected cause must stop and understand that Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction, Jerusalem is the address."


"There is a message we must convey to those who kidnapped the Yarmouk [Palestinian] refugee camp [in Syria] with baseless false slogans, pretexts, and excuses," he continued. "We say to them: 'The [place for] resistance and Jihad is not the Yarmouk refugee camp. Whoever wants resistance, whoever wants Jihad, the direction for Jihad is well-known and clear. Everyone knows it. I don't think that there is anyone who doesn't know where Jihad is supposed to take place."
"I don't think that there is anyone who doesn't know to where we should direct efforts or where to concentrate the masses. I don't think there is anyone who doesn't know this. Those who send young people to Syria or elsewhere to die for a misdirected cause must stop and understand that Jerusalem is still waiting. Jerusalem is the direction, Jerusalem is the address."
PMW notes that Abbas applauded to the speech, which came just hours after PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki claimed to Maariv that “the Arab states will never recognize a Jewish state.”
On Saturday, Abbas told a visiting delegation that there will be "no peace between us and Israel" without eastern Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state.