Police arrest Al-Aqsa Mosque preacher for incitement
Sheikh Khaled al-Mughrabi recently delivered sermon saying ‘Allah can erase every memory of the Jews’ but wants Muslims to do it
Israeli police on Wednesday arrested a prominent preacher who regularly speaks from the pulpit at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque for inciting violence.
Sheikh Khaled al-Mughrabi was interrogated and brought before a Jerusalem court for an extension of his remand Wednesday afternoon.
Mughrabi was questioned by police earlier this year after being videotaped telling worshipers that Jews kidnap non-Jewish children in order to extract their blood into barrels with nails. He has claimed Jews control the world’s wealth and use their control of the pharmaceutical industry to spread disease.
Two weeks ago Channel 10 reported that Mughrabi said in a speech that “Allah can erase every memory of the Jews from every place on the planet, but he wants us to act in order to fulfill his commandment.”
“The most important thing that it’s possible to do is to protect the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and every one of its guardians will receive 70 virgins. A martyr will get two,” he said.
Last month, as violence between Palestinians and Israeli escalated over the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, Mughrabi delivered a sermon saying Jews will indeed build a new Temple in Jerusalem — dedicated to the devil.
“The Children of Israel will be forced — they will not concede — they will be forced to change their plans to build the Temple inside the structure of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and will have to build it outside the Al-Aqsa Mosque… A Temple of heresy to worship the Devil,” Mughrabi said in one of his twice weekly lectures at the mosque, according to the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch.
The reason for the devil worship, he explains, is “because the Anti-Christ won’t appear unless this Temple is built and the Devil is worshipped there… [At the End of Days] we will follow the Jews everywhere. They will not escape us. They will not be able to escape us. The rock and tree will speak, according to the Hadith (tradition) of the Prophet [Muhammad]… and it is a reliable promise from the Prophet according to which the tree and the rock will speak and say: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ The Children of Israel will all be exterminated, the Anti-Christ will be killed and the Muslims will live in comfort for a long time,” he said.
A video of the lesson was posted online at the Al-Aqsa Mosque’s YouTube channel, and reposted with English translation to the PMW channel.
Mughrabi has also been caught on tape urging children in East Jerusalem to become “martyrs” by attacking Jews.
Israel has charged that Palestinian political and religious leaders are inciting the recent wave of Palestinian stabbings and other terror attacks against Israelis.
