Anti-Jew Day in Iran

Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

Anti-Jew Day in Iran

Quds Day shows how bloody and intractable the Arab/Israeli crisis is.

Tens of thousands of Muslims observed an anti-Jewish day on September 26. Muslims in Iran, Gaza and elsewhere kept the 30th “Quds Day” observance by marching down streets, burning Israeli and American flags, mocking the Holocaust, celebrating past suicide bombings and calling for more. Arutz Sheva reports (September 28):

Iranian Muslim students at the Palestine Square in Tehran unveiled a book mocking the Holocaust, with its cover depicting a Jew with a crooked nose while drawing the outline of dead bodies. The book depicts Jews leaving the Nazi gas chambers with a counter that records “5,999,999,” one less than the round figure of 6 million Jews who were Nazi terror victims.

“One picture,” Arutz Sheva continued, “shows Jews entering a Nazi extermination furnace and leaving as terrorists who are toting guns.” Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas politician Ahmed Abu Helbiya celebrated the school shooting of eight yeshiva students, one of the bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem and the recent attempted running over of more Jews by an Arab in his car. Helbiya also told Arabs to “contain the enemy and halt [Israel’s] aggression by planning martyrdom operations” (ibid.).

Quds Day was instituted in 1979 by the Iranian ayatollah in response to Israel’s “Jerusalem Day,” which celebrates the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967.

The days surrounding Quds Day featured no less bloody rhetoric from Muslim leaders. The previous Tuesday, in New York, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a Nazi Nuremberg-style speech from behind the United Nations General Assembly podium:

The dignity, integrity and rights of the American and European people are being played with by a small but deceitful number of people called Zionists. Although they are a minuscule minority, they have been dominating an important portion of the financial and monetary centers as well as the political decision-making centers of some European countries and the U.S. in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.

Ahmadinejad, whose characteristic Nazi-like anti-Jewish polemics are now viewed as commonplace, judging by the comparatively sparse coverage of his latest rant, added, “The Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse” and the “American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road ….” He concluded addressing the nations of the world by saying Allah’s hand of power will emerge from the sleeve of the oppressed nations and put an end to America’s power, then prayed to the “great Almighty” from the podium in conclusion.

Then last Wednesday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who refers to Israel as a “cancerous tumor,” said the world of Islam would soon see the day Israeli territory is taken over by Palestinians. He also called Hamas’s political leader in Gaza a “mujahed,” or Islamic holy warrior, adding that Iran “will never let you be alone.” Of the “tumor,” Khamenei said Israel “has weakened day by day. … Today, officials of the Zionist regime acknowledge that they are moving toward weakness, destruction and defeat.”

Quds Day marks one of the most stark contrasts in the Middle East conflict. For one people, it is just another day to find a compromise through words and treaties. For another, it is a celebration of “death to Jews.” In spite of Western rose-colored glasses, Quds Day proves that the solution to the bloody Middle Eastern crisis does not lie in just talking it through.

But the immediate consequence of this day is much more specific and imminent: the fall of East Jerusalem. The Trumpet has forecasted that a peaceful agreement will not be reached between the two enemies and that Muslim Arabs will seize the city by violent force. Read more about this future headline in “Jerusalem Is About to Be Cut in Half,” “Jerusalem: Why the Miracles Have Ceased” and “Jerusalem: City of Hope.”