Frightened of deal, Hamas mouthpiece says Saudi royal family are "Zionists"

Middle East Monitor, an English-language site that is pro-Hamas and pro-Muslim Brotherhood, has an amusing article accusing Mohammad bin Salman, and the entire Saudi royal family, of being Zionist.

For decades, Arabs would accuse their political enemies of being Zionists in order to shut them down. That doesn't seem to work any more, but Hamas still tries, as this article by a Gaza writer shows.

It starts off with:

Last week, a prominent Saudi Sheikh, Mohammed Al-Issa, visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of its liberation, which signalled the end of the Nazi Holocaust. Although dozens of Muslim scholars have visited the site, where about one million Jews were killed during World War Two, according to the Auschwitz Memorial Centre’s press office, Al-Issa is the most senior Muslim religious leader to do so.

Visiting Auschwitz is not a problem for a Muslim; Islam orders Muslims to reject unjustified killing of any human being, no matter what their faith is. Al-Issa is a senior ally of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), who apparently cares little for the sanctity of human life, though, and the visit to Auschwitz has very definite political connotations beyond any Islamic context.

By sending Al-Issa to the camp, Bin Salman wanted to show his support for Israel, which exploits the Holocaust for geopolitical colonial purposes. 

It's particularly funny that the author says that there is no problem for Muslims to visit Auschwitz - yet every one who does so is invariably attacked. The most egregious example is  Prof. Mohammed Dajani Daoudi who was forced out of his job, subjected to death threats and had his car blown up after he lead a trip to Auschwitz. Also, Hamas has been bitterly against teaching the Holocaust in UNRWA schools, so the assertion that Arabs and Muslims have no problem with visiting Auschwitz is quite a lie.

We should not be shocked, therefore, to see a Zionist Muslim leader in these trying times. It is reasonable to say that Bin Salman’s grandfather and father were Zionists, as close friends of Zionist leaders. Logic suggests that Bin Salman comes from a Zionist dynasty.
This has been evident from his close relationship with Zionists and positive approaches to the Israeli occupation and establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, calling it “[the Jews’] ancestral homeland”. This means that he has no issue with the ethnic cleansing of almost 800,000 Palestinians in 1948, during which thousands were killed and their homes demolished in order to establish the Zionist state of Israel.

The line from admitting that Israel is the Jews' ancestral homeland and supporting the (fictional) ethnic cleansing of 800,000 is not at all obvious - unless you are an Arab who sees life as a zero-sum game.

As the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Bin Salman has imprisoned dozens of Palestinians, including representatives of Hamas. In doing so he is serving Israel’s interests. Moreover, he has blamed the Palestinians for not making peace with the occupation state. Bin Salman “excoriated the Palestinians for missing key opportunities,” wrote Danial Benjamin in Moment magazine. He pointed out that the prince’s father, King Salman, has played the role of counterweight by saying that Saudi Arabia “permanently stands by Palestine and its people’s right to an independent state with occupied East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Israeli journalist Barak Ravid of Israel’s Channel 13 News reported Bin Salman as saying: “In the last several decades the Palestinian leadership has missed one opportunity after the other and rejected all the peace proposals it was given. It is about time the Palestinians take the proposals and agree to come to the negotiations table or shut up and stop complaining.” This is reminiscent of the words of the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, one of the Zionist founders of Israel, that the Palestinians “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Apparently, pointing out obvious truths is proof of one's Zionism.

While discussing the issue of the current Saudi support for Israeli policies and practices in Palestine with a credible Palestinian official last week, he told me that the Palestinians had contacted the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to ask him not to relocate his country’s embassy to Jerusalem. “The Saudis have been putting pressure on us in order to relocate our embassy to Jerusalem,” replied the Brazilian leader. What more evidence of Mohammad Bin Salman’s Zionism do we need?

I have no idea if this is true, but it would certainly be cool if it was!

(h/t Mark D.)

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