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‘Al-Quds Day’ in D.C. –Has American Gone Mad?

The Editors

 

 

No, it wasn’t the streets of Teheran, Damascus or Gaza City.  It was downtown Washington, D.C., America’s capital, --Sheridan Square, to be geographically precise .It was a rally in celebration of “Al-Quds Day,” the annual Muslin “holiday” following the month-long fasting and feasting of “Ramadan”, introduced to the Islamic world by Iran’s Ayatolah Khomeini in 1979.

 

Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, but the Al-Quds of “Al Quds Day” is light- years removed from Isaiah‘s “city of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.” Nor is it the city from which a nation bound by the Covenant ushered in the Jubilee over the centuries as it heralded “liberty throughout the land and unto all the inhabitants thereof” with the blast of a “shofar” heard around the civilized world.  This is the Al-Quds  of  terminal, unremitting hate . Its bannered slogans proclaim “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” as its celebrants annually  renew their “religious” oath to “liberate” Jerusalem from the clutches of the infidel Jews as a prelude to the dismemberment of the “Zionist entity.”

 

The first sight that greeted participants at this September 23rd hate fest in the shadow of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial were  the yellow flags of Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based, Iranian-armed terrorist organization that enjoys a stellar position on the State Department’s “Most Wanted” list. How, even under the most liberal conception of “freedom of expression,”, this collection of international thugs could have been accorded the right of representation in the capital city of the United State, defies rational explanation. 

 

That wasn’t  the only  aspect of this affair that defied explanation. . While the Hezbollah flags were flying high  that day in Sheridan Square,  it wasn’t Hezbollah or any other Arab or Muslim group that  was responsible for engineering Washington’s premier hate spectacle.  In fact –  buckle your seatbelt --  it was strictly a local job, the work of one Faheem Darab, an employee of the Fairfax County, Virginia Department of Planning and Zoning.. Darab’s ability to pull this stunt off in board daylight would make an excellent starting point for a federal, or at the very least a state investigation, but he certainly served his sponsors royally.

 

Dominating the proceeding s was not simply the demonization of Israel, its leaders and its people  but the unabashed calls for its destruction coming from virtually ever speaker who mounted .the rostrum. In full view of a  poster with a quote from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah  declaring “Israel is our enemy…an aggressive, illegal, illegitimate entity that has no future in our land,” Afeef Khan, a mouthpiece for prominent  terrorism supporter Imam Mohamed Al-Asi bellowed, “If we want a positive, secure and just future for the Palestinians and, in fact, for all the people of the Middle East and for all the people of North Africa, we cannot get away from the fact that the solution begins with the complete destruction, the annihilation and the utter dismemberment of Israel.”

 

As Barack Obama would have discovered had he been present, Khan’s bellicosity didn’t stop at Israel.  “And the head politician on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he asserted in a clear racist reference to its occupant  a few blocks way, “who of us has the courage to say to this politician that you are a regular house negro or are you the quintessential house negro? Who of us has the courage when we couch our presentation in suggesting that the problem can be solved by the dismemberment of the State of Israel and the support that state receives from the United States?”

 

Hamas, Hezbollah’s Iranian-armed confrere on Israel’s southern flank, collected  its  share of Al-Quds Day adulation from “Ibraham,” a rapper spokesman for the radical “Viva Palestina” movement. “My mind is in the zone of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam,” Ibrahim rhapsodized, referring to the Gaza terrorist organization’s military wing. “It’s so powerful, we [are] so awesome…And I promise, there will be another intifada. You think our children are scared to be martyrs?”

 

Any notion that star turns at this fest were going to be limited to guys named Ibrahim and Mohamed was rudely disposed of with the summoning to the rostrum of  the Reverend Graylan Hagler. The “Senior Minister” of Washington’s  Plymouth Congressional United Church of Christ and National President of the far Left  “Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice,” Hagler is a past-master at anti-Israel demagoguery. of the most extreme order and no slouch at calling for the Jewish state’s destruction. Only those with short memories will have forgotten his having  told an anti-Israel rally just a few years back that he was “so glad the silence is over, and just like the days in the anti-apartheid movement, we’re going to stand up together until we dismantle the State of Israel.”

 

Having been burned for that remark, the “Reverend” was a bit more circumspect on this Al-Quds Day, but no less malevolent. “You don’t need to be in Palestine to resist the structures of evil because the structures of evil have tentacles all over the world…,” he told the Sheridan Square claque. “And we’ve got to continue to resist settlements being placed on Palestinian territory. It’s all against international law. It’s against moral law and it’s against the law of God…”

 

And so it went with speaker after speaker ranting,  raging and rapping as posters warning “Zionists, Hizbollah is coming for you” and charging “Israel is committing genocide, U.S. helping on the side” were being waved at the television cameras. What the Reverend Hagler knows about “the law of God” would be seriously laughable if what he thinks he knows wasn’t so grotesque. How a patricidal lynch bomb, assembled not by a mullah or a mosque leader, but by a  public state employee, was empowered to strut its  stuff under the rubric of “freedom of expression” is another matter, one that calls for some very tall explaining.