Hamas cannot rule out the possibility of launching a third intifada, Hamas chief Mahmoud al-Zahar told this reporter in an exclusive interview.
Zahar spoke as clashes called for by Hamas were started by Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank this week, purportedly in protest of Israel’s rededication of the Hurva, an ancient synagogue in the city.
Jerusalem Police Commissioner David Cohen stated he did not believe that the Hamas-directed violence would spark a third intifada.
Zahar, however, commented, “If you are going to read what is the meaning of the intifada in the political books, one of the characters is that no body can expect how it could start or continue, so everybody now is upset about what happened yesterday.”
“This is how the first intifada started,” he said, speaking by cell phone from Gaza. “People demonstrated in Jerusalem and it escalated. Nobody will know what happened but I can image that everyone inside and outside Palestine is deeply frustrated in the Israeli building nearby the al-Aqsa mosque at this particular time.”
Hamas Chief Cooling Off On Obama
The chief of Hamas in the Gaza Strip has some political advice for President Obama: Get your house in order before mediating talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
“He is unable to do anything in the [Middle East] before he restores his dignity and the trust of his own people,” Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas chief in Gaza, told WorldNetDaily in an interview this week.
Zahar noticed Obama’s slipping domestic poll numbers and also claimed those in the Middle East have lost confidence in the man who once inspired hope in the likes of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
Zahar also advised Obama to “restore his balance concerning the nature of this conflict between the Israeli government and the administration. Obama’s problem is not in his attitude but in his ability to actually get anything done in the region.”
The Hamas chieftain’s rhetoric is in marked contrast to statements from his Islamist group during the 2008 presidential campaign.
At that time, Hamas’s chief political adviser in Gaza Ahmed Yousef stated in a joint interview with WND and the John Batchelor Show of New York’s WABC Radio that he “hoped” Obama would win the presidential elections.
Yousef’s regard for Obama became a talking point of the 2008 campaign, with both Obama and Republican challenger Sen. John McCain trading repeated barbs over his statements.
U.S. Official Meets With Temple Institute
A member of the U.S. government met with organizers of this past Tuesday’s International Temple Mount Awareness Day to pepper the activists about their intentions regarding Jewish ascent to the holy site.
“It was obvious,” one of the planners told this column, “the individual who met with us from the Obama government was concerned about the Jewish connection to the Temple Mount and what is being done to deepen it.”
The organizer talked on condition of anonymity and also on condition that the name of the U.S. official who met with the Temple event planners be kept confidential.
The International Temple Mount Awareness Day was planned by a coalition of Jewish nationalist groups in part to protest Israeli police restriction of Jewish prayer on the holy site.
In coordination with the Waqf, the Mount’s Islamic custodians, Israeli police ban all non-Muslims from praying on the Mount despite an Israeli Supreme Court decision requiring police to offer an arrangement that will enable public Jewish prayer on the site. The police cite security concerns, explaining they fear the outbreak of Muslim violence if non-Muslim prayer is allowed.
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Rev. Jim Wallis, a member of President Obama’s “faith council” who is described as a spiritual adviser to the president, is a socialist activist who has championed communist causes and previously labeled the U.S. “the great captor and destroyer of human life.”
Wallis was in the news last week urging Christians to stop watching Fox News host Glenn Beck’s program over Beck’s remarks against churches that preach “social justice.”
Wallis currently serves on Obama’s White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He reportedly is a spiritual adviser to Obama and has known the president for years.
Wallis began his activism as a protester, later becoming Michigan leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, the 1960’s antiwar group from which Bill Ayers’ Weatherman domestic terrorist organization splintered.
Discover the Networkssaid that as a theology student, Wallis founded an anti-capitalism magazine called the Post-American, which identified wealth redistribution and government-managed economies as the keys to achieving “social justice.”
In 1971, Wallis renamed his magazine Sojourners. He has since served as editor of the publication.
Sojourners’ official “statement of faith” urges readers to “refuse to accept [capitalist] structures and assumptions that normalize poverty and segregate the world by class.”
Wallis’s magazine actively lobbied for communist regimes that seized power in Latin America in the late 1970s, including the Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua. Sojourners in the 1980s was a fierce opponent of the U.S. nuclear buildup, claiming the policy was “an intolerable evil,” irreconcilably at odds with Christianity.
Discover the Networks notes that Sojourners originally formed a socialist commune in Washington, D.C., where members shared finances and launched anti-capitalist activism.
In his 1976 book, Agenda for Biblical People, Wallis calls the U.S. “the great power, the great seducer, the great captor and destroyer of human life, the great master of humanity and history in its totalitarian claims and designs.”
Wallis continues to openly support socialism. In 1995 he co-founded Call to Renewal, a coalition of religious groups demanding the spread of U.S. wealth to promote “social justice.”
As a guest on MSNBC last week, Wallis said “social justice” is at the heart of the Bible.
Aaron Klein is Jerusalem bureau chief and senior reporter for Internet giant WorldNetDaily.com. He is also host of an investigative radio program on New York’s 77-WABC Radio, the largest talk radio station in the U.S., every Sunday between 2:00-4:00.
