PA’s Sharia Judge: Covid, climate change, inflation are Allah’s punishments for ignoring the ‘Palestinians’

[duluxe]

https://palwatch.org/page/18219

The PA is a master of evading responsibility because it is so easy to blame Israel for everything that goes wrong, including the spread of the Coronavirus. In a column in the official PA daily, Muwaffaq Matar, Fatah Revolutionary Council member and regular columnist for the paper accused Israel of deliberately bringing COVID-19 into the PA:

“It would not be an exaggeration if we say that the racist occupation government has worked to export the ‘COVID-19’ (Coronavirus) epidemic to us, after our institutions succeeded in limiting and reducing the scope of its spread, as [Israel] used the virus as a new weapon to weaken the scope of economic life to the lowest point, and to leave it in an almost fateful dependency on its economy!”
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 21, 2021]

A similar libel was expressed in the cartoon above, claiming that Israel deliberately infects terrorist prisoners with the virus or purposefully maintains conditions in the prisons under which the virus can thrive.

The image shows a prisoner sitting slumped over on a bed in a prison cell while a hand holding a Coronavirus particle reaches through the bars of the cell door. A number of other Coronavirus particles are seen floating in the air.

Text on image: “The international campaign to protect the prisoners in the occupation’s prison from the Coronavirus epidemic
#The_occupation’s_Coronavirus_is_killing_the_prisoners”
[Facebook page of the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs, June 18, 2020]

Referring to a Hadith according to which Islam’s Prophet Muhammad said that “If the people see the oppressors and do not protest against them, they are liable to all be included in the punishment,” PA Chairman Abbas’ advisor on religious affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, likewise explained that all catastrophes that have befallen the world recently – including the COVID-19 pandemic – is Israel, the “oppressor’s,” and the silent bystanders’ fault because they let the “injustice” happen to “Palestine”:

PA Supreme Shari’ah Judge Mahmoud Al-Habbash: “Abu Bakr (i.e., founder of the Rashidun Caliphate) said: ‘I heard Allah’s Messenger say: If the people see the oppressors and do not protest against them, they are liable to all be included in the punishment.’ In other words, Allah is liable to bring down punishment on everyone, on all the people who are silent facing injustice, agree with injustice, and defend the oppressors… I think that today we are seeing the realization of this Hadith (i.e., sayings and practices attributed to Islam’s Prophet Muhammad) as reality. All of humanity, from one end of the earth to the other, is being included in one punishment, in this disaster [of the Coronavirus] that has befallen humanity…
Is there a greater injustice than the injustice directed against us? Our land was stolen, our people were expelled, our holy sites were desecrated, and not only is the entire world silent facing the oppressors but they are also blaming the victim…
The punishment that is befalling all of humanity – the rise in prices, economic collapse, epidemics, climate change, global warming – everything that is happening in the universe is because of the injustice.”