What’s a small call for jihad in “a little slice of Americana”?
The Wall Street Journal’s Aug. 18 article featuring the comfortable Palestinian-American enclave in the Palestinian West Bank depicts the community as American as apple pie and Norman Rockwell “An Enclave of Americans Finds a Difficult New Reality in the West Bank.” In that “little slice of Americana,” as Omar Abdel-Baqui begins, “American dual nationals who have come to retire or to raise families in a place where their dollars go further and it feels like home. Many speak English as their go-to language, live in large suburban houses and eat in East Coast-style pizza parlors.”
So intent is Abdel-Baqui on advancing this appealing, familiar image of American suburbia enriched with local Middle Eastern hues that he glaringly excises a highly revealing and very un-American detail.
Thus, regarding the following scene (photograph pasted below), Omar Abdel-Baqui selectively reports: “In the home of Amir Rabee, the 14-year-old killed in the almond grove, Palestinian and American flags hung side by side on the wall next to a memorial for the boy.”
The photograph of this scene (at left) accompanies the above description.
The memorial’s text, not noted by Abdel-Baqui, contains a notably un-American, and strikingly violent message, calling for jihad, or violent attacks, including against civilians. It states (translation by CAMERA Arabic): “The heroic martyr Amir Muhammad Saada Rabee, who died as a shahid, on his homeland, the land of Jihad, Palestine.” (Emphasis added.)
Notably, the memorial’s reference to “land of Jihad” — with Jihad referring to war for Islam — is not limited to simply treating the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a warzone. Rather, the accompanying map defines all of Israel’s internationally recognized territory as Jihad’s target. Given the context, with Palestine erasing all of Israel, this is a violent call for a holy war against Israel and conquest of all of its territory.
This key information, which provides critical insight into the father’s views which clearly do not align with a life of “Americana,” should have been included in the description of the scene.
A Tehran billboard states in Hebrew: “Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth and that is just the beginning of the story.” This screenshot captures the caption before the Journal corrected.
Abdel-Baqui’s failure to note the memorial’s call for the erasure of Israel recalls a 2024 Wall Street Journal photo caption which likewise ignored the Hebrew text on a Tehran billboard calling for Israel to “be wiped off the face of the earth.” To their credit, Journal editors published a clarification of that caption, and CAMERA calls on the paper to again clarify this latest blatant omission of a call for the elimination of the Jewish state.
Separately, CAMERA has flagged the article’s highly tendentious account of a disputed incident. Abdel-Baqui writes that American Ambassador to Israel Mike “Huckabee toured Taybeh, another town with a large population of U.S. citizens and one of the few majority-Christian villages in the West Bank, after several Israeli settler attacks, including one that left fields at the foot of an ancient church ablaze, according to local leaders.” (Emphasis added.)
Not included in the journalist’s one-sided account of the disputed incident which took place near a historic church in Taybeh is the fact the only concrete evidence of Jewish involvement shows Israeli settlers rushing to extinguish a nearby fire which was reportedly also threatening an Israeli farmer’s land, as previously recounted by CAMERA’s David Litman.
CAMERA has requested clarification on these two points. Stay tuned for any updates.
With research by CAMERA Arabic.