Abdul Hadi Palazzi - Manipulating Muslims VII
Abdul Rahman T. | 10.02.2004 15:00 | Anti-racism | Globalisation | Migration
Seventh part - This text on the adventurer Abdul Hadi Palazzi is taken from a website ( 
http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi) which shows how the Muslim community is being manipulated by some quite surprising characters, for political reasons.
I am putting this article up in several instalments, as it is quite long - bear with me and skip if you find it boring.
http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi) which shows how the Muslim community is being manipulated by some quite surprising characters, for political reasons. I am putting this article up in several instalments, as it is quite long - bear with me and skip if you find it boring.
Abdul Hadi Palazzi - Manipulating Muslims VII
...................
( http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi/gb/palazzi06_gb.htm)
Holocaust Denial, two very different "Terrorists" and some kaleidoscopic turnabouts
Hebron is well known for its group of extremist settlers; and one of the most extreme of these is the New York born American Baruch Marzel, leader of the Kach movement of followers of Rav Kahane. Marzel's movement was outlawed in Israel in 1994 and officially declared a "foreign terrorist organization" in the USA. Baruch Marzel has been involved in countless physical assaults on his Palestinian neighbours. He is one of the directors of the Friends of Goldstein Association, honouring a young man whom his admirers describe as follows:
"On the Feast of Purim (February 1994), Dr. Baruch Goldstein, dressed as an army officer, entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and shot to death 29 Arabs and wounded approximately a hundred more. It is our great misfortune that Dr. Baruch Goldstein may G-D avenge his blood, who was brutally murdered by the Arabs is no longer with us".
On a less bloodthirsty level, Marzel organized a campaign of graffiti and hooliganism against a visit by the Pope to Israel.[1]
Marzel is actually so far out on the right wing fringe that even the Yesha Council, which brings together the settlers in the Occupied Territories, distanced itself[2] from him after he called the President of Israel a "murderer". Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith - a very markedly Zionist organization - described Marzel's movement as as "a cult of violence and racism" that had "violated both the substance and spirit of Jewish tradition".[3]
This can help us to understand exactly what it means, when we open the website of the religious settlers of Hebron ( http://www.hebron.org.il/pics/shechpalazzi.htm) and find a picture of Palazzi cheerfully dialoguing with Marzel himself, no less, on February 4th, 2001.
Palazzi (on the left) and Marzel (on the right)
Already in 1998, Palazzi had published a "Letter From a Muslim Clergyman to Two Muslim Brothers: Israel Should Declare Oslo 'Null' and 'Void'", ( http://www.rb.org.il/Islam-Israel/commentary/islamcom5.htm) where he claimed that the Palestinian people did not even exist and solemnly stated that " I believe that the Israeli government should have dealt with Arafat [...] in the same way that it dealt with Adolf Eichmann.." One wonders, should the Oslo agreement be declared null and void, what would the fate of native Palestinians be?
We doubt Palazzi would accept granting Israeli citizenship, as this would threaten the ethnic character of the state of Israel. An obscure reference in his "Letter" to Jordan as a natural home for the Palestinian people seems to hint at the prospect of their deportation across the river.
Ideas like these do exist: there are people who deny the existence of the Palestinian people, just as there are people who deny the existence of the gas chambers. However we don't usually call such people "moderates". We call them extremists. Yet the extremist Zionist Palazzi, less than ten years ago, was not even a Zionist at all. He certainly was not a Zionist when he used to work at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Rome. In those years, he undertook translating and editing a book by Ayotallah Tabataba'i L'insegnamento islamico ("The Teaching of Islam") and another one by Mortada Motahhari Vita e condotta del profeta Muhammad ("Life and Conduct of the Prophet Muhammad"), not to mention Gesù profeta dell'islam ("Jesus Prophet of Islam") published by Atanor, a publishing house set up by former militants of the far right movement Europa Civiltà who had become Masons.
Nor would many people have thought of Palazzi as a Zionist the day he had his picture proudly taken next to Lebanon's Hezbollah spiritual leader, Shaykh Fadlallah:
Palazzi with Hezbollah leader Shaykh Fadlallah (click on image to enlarge)
Palazzi was certainly not a Zionist when he used to go to Turkey to attend the meetings of the Islamic party of Necmettin Erbakan. Nor was he a Zionist to any extent when his small magazine Comunità Islamica used to regularly publish on the front page the same appeal, issue after issue:
"No Muslim can accept that even a single clod of the HOLY LAND be subject to trading and sold at a vile price, or that the legitimacy of the Zionist presence in Palestine be recognized."
Clearly he was against the Oslo agreement in those days too; but from the other side.
The very first issue of Palazzi's magazine hosted an article significantly titled "HOLOCAUST? NO THANKS!". The author (then a very loyal follower of Palazzi, today an equally loyal follower of the extremist Adel Smith) wrote:
"We believe the time has come for Muslims, and for all people endowed with free will, to forcibly overthrow and unmask what is probably the most colossal lie in human history: the lie of the 'holocaust' [...]
In other words, THEY INVENTED YESTERDAY AND CONTINUE TO INVENT TODAY A GENOCIDE WHICH ACTUALLY NEVER TOOK PLACE, IN ORDER TO DISGUISE THE PAST, PRESENT AND PERHAPS FUTURE IMPLEMENTATION OF A REAL GENOCIDE: THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE BY THE STATE OF ISRAEL, BY WORLD ZIONISM AND BY ITS ALLIES.
The next time, GOD willing, we will speak about the 'diary' of Anna Frank".
Palazzi's magazine kept its word: the next issue devoted no less than six full pages to an abstract from a booklet by Ditlieb Felderer, published by the nostalgic "Edizioni La Sfinge", under the title: "ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: A FRAUD". The discovery of this Holocaust-denier article made quite a scandal, with articles in the daily press claiming that the "Imam of Rome" was an "anti-Semite".
Massimo Palazzi's magazine (Comunità islamica, Anno II, n. 1, January 1992,)
tells the world that Anne Frank's Diary is a "forgery" ;
the evidence, a text published by the pro-Nazi Edizioni La Sfinge
Click on picture to enlarge
Events of nearly ten years ago. Palazzi today claims that he was merely the director of the magazine, blissfully unaware of the articles published in it. Odd, considering that the articles came out in two consecutive issues of a very small magazine. Palazzi reads a lot, and it is surprising, to say the least, to think he never read the articles in his own magazine.
The Jewish community of Rome suffered atrociously during the war, and is historically progressive. One can understand, therefore, why they tend to accuse Palazzi of being a holocaust denier because of these articles. This may be excessive. Let us say he is a person who didn't mind holocaust denial until it got him in trouble with the Jewish community.
The problem is not that Palazzi has changed his opinions. It is that he certainly would never admit he did: a "Mawlana" can never be wrong. The same issue of the magazine hosting "HOLOCAUST? NO THANKS!" had an article by Palazzi titled "THE EXPERT ANSWERS". Oddly enough, as we will soon see, this expresses the same notion as the title of the section of... a Jewish website where Palazzi currently writes: "ASK THE IMAM".
When did Palazzi change his views on Zionism, or if we prefer, perform teshuva? As we can see by the date of these magazines, in 1992 he was certainly not a critic of Zionism, to put it mildly. By 1995, he had built himself a solid reputation as the Zionist Imam, at least abroad - in Italy, his supporters are to be found exclusively among a small but noisy right-wing minority of the Jewish community. Mainstream Judaism in Italy sensibly tends to prefer dialogue with Muslims who are less pliable, but who can be better counted on to represent the real Islamic community in this country. Jealousy in this regard may explain why Palazzi unceasingly calls the main Islamic organization in Italy, the UCOII, with whom Jews and Catholics regularly meet, a "terrorist organization".
However a small minority of the Jewish community, mainly known for its noisy attacks on the President of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, prof. Amos Luzzatto, does support Palazzi. This group does not seem to mind Palazzi's stream of messages describing the mainstream Italian Jewish leadership as "Kapos sold out to Palestinian terror".
Palazzi's conversion to Zionism was by no means his only sudden change of heart. In 1993, elections were held for the position of Mayor of Rome. Palazzi campaigned for Rutelli, the progressive candidate and likely winner. Against everybody's expectation, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the small neo-Fascist MSI party, came a close second during the first ballot. Palazzi changed sides within a few hours and began launching a campaign to support Fini for the second ballot. In a rare show of loyalty, Palazzi still today is close to Fini's refurbished "Alleanza Nazionale" party, though he also flirts with media tycoon Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the small Radical Party.
Palazzi's about-turns do not only involve Zionism and politics. Today, he presents himself as a fierce enemy of the so-called Wahhabist current in Islam. In his usual excommunicatory style, he writes:
"None of the sects which preceded it had ever made such bestial affirmations regarding Allah the Almighty as those spread by the Wahhabites in their sectarian propaganda".[4]
On his website ( http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/amislam/shia.htm), he is especially disparaging about the deceased Wahhabi preacher, ‘Abdu-l-‘Aziz Ibn Baz, whose very title of "Mufti" he puts between quotation marks:
The following writers are representatives of this [Wahhabi] cult. Their followers call them "Shaykhs", and Muslims must stay away from their books, papers and Web pages, and do not confuse them with real Sunni scholars: [...] ‘Abdu-l-‘Aziz Ibn Baz (the deceased official "Mufti" of the Saudi regime and their Rabitah, who oppressed Ahlu-s-Sunnah in al-Haramayn).
In this case, his turnabout was too fast even for himself. In fact, on another website of his, Palazzi proudly claims ( http://www.flashnet.it/users/fn034463/) that his own title as an Islamic teacher was granted by the very man every Muslim should stay away from - no ironical quotes around the title of Mufti this time:
"[Palazzi was] authorized to teach Islam in Italy thanks to a degree by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Shaykh Abdulaziz Bin Baz"
And it was certainly out of gratitude to Bin Baz that about ten years ago Palazzi wrote, with his usual irate enthusiasm:
"[those who claim that Wahhabism is a heterodox sect] and express themselves in such a senseless fashion, clearly do not realize that they are letting themselves be used as docile tools of anti-Islamic propaganda, which has always hurled the worst lies on the 'Puritan Wahhabites, enemies of progress'. Certainly, the forces of misbelief fear the teaching based on the Koran and the Sunnah, that is the Islam preached by °Abdu '1-Uahhàb [Abdul Wahhab] and by the wise Sunnis".[5]
In all his moves, what kind of following has Palazzi been able to build up? That will be the subject of the following chapters.
FOOTNOTES
[1] La Repubblica March 19, 2000).
[1] PeaceWatch Vol. 1 #11 Aug 25, 1998.
[2] Dean E. Murphy, "Terror Label No Hindrance to Anti-Arab Jewish Group", The New York Times, 19 dic. 2000
[3] X-Sender:
fn034463@mbox1.flashnet.it
X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 16:49:54 +0200
To: islamic@libero.it
From: Istituto Culturale della Comunità Islamica Italiana
Subject: Fwd: Propaganda dell'estremismo wahhabita in Italia
[4]In Comunità Islamica, year I, pages 25-27.
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(
http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi/gb/palazzi06_gb.htm) Holocaust Denial, two very different "Terrorists" and some kaleidoscopic turnabouts
Hebron is well known for its group of extremist settlers; and one of the most extreme of these is the New York born American Baruch Marzel, leader of the Kach movement of followers of Rav Kahane. Marzel's movement was outlawed in Israel in 1994 and officially declared a "foreign terrorist organization" in the USA. Baruch Marzel has been involved in countless physical assaults on his Palestinian neighbours. He is one of the directors of the Friends of Goldstein Association, honouring a young man whom his admirers describe as follows:
"On the Feast of Purim (February 1994), Dr. Baruch Goldstein, dressed as an army officer, entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and shot to death 29 Arabs and wounded approximately a hundred more. It is our great misfortune that Dr. Baruch Goldstein may G-D avenge his blood, who was brutally murdered by the Arabs is no longer with us".
On a less bloodthirsty level, Marzel organized a campaign of graffiti and hooliganism against a visit by the Pope to Israel.[1]
Marzel is actually so far out on the right wing fringe that even the Yesha Council, which brings together the settlers in the Occupied Territories, distanced itself[2] from him after he called the President of Israel a "murderer". Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith - a very markedly Zionist organization - described Marzel's movement as as "a cult of violence and racism" that had "violated both the substance and spirit of Jewish tradition".[3]
This can help us to understand exactly what it means, when we open the website of the religious settlers of Hebron (
http://www.hebron.org.il/pics/shechpalazzi.htm) and find a picture of Palazzi cheerfully dialoguing with Marzel himself, no less, on February 4th, 2001. Palazzi (on the left) and Marzel (on the right)
Already in 1998, Palazzi had published a "Letter From a Muslim Clergyman to Two Muslim Brothers: Israel Should Declare Oslo 'Null' and 'Void'", (
http://www.rb.org.il/Islam-Israel/commentary/islamcom5.htm) where he claimed that the Palestinian people did not even exist and solemnly stated that " I believe that the Israeli government should have dealt with Arafat [...] in the same way that it dealt with Adolf Eichmann.." One wonders, should the Oslo agreement be declared null and void, what would the fate of native Palestinians be? We doubt Palazzi would accept granting Israeli citizenship, as this would threaten the ethnic character of the state of Israel. An obscure reference in his "Letter" to Jordan as a natural home for the Palestinian people seems to hint at the prospect of their deportation across the river.
Ideas like these do exist: there are people who deny the existence of the Palestinian people, just as there are people who deny the existence of the gas chambers. However we don't usually call such people "moderates". We call them extremists. Yet the extremist Zionist Palazzi, less than ten years ago, was not even a Zionist at all. He certainly was not a Zionist when he used to work at the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Rome. In those years, he undertook translating and editing a book by Ayotallah Tabataba'i L'insegnamento islamico ("The Teaching of Islam") and another one by Mortada Motahhari Vita e condotta del profeta Muhammad ("Life and Conduct of the Prophet Muhammad"), not to mention Gesù profeta dell'islam ("Jesus Prophet of Islam") published by Atanor, a publishing house set up by former militants of the far right movement Europa Civiltà who had become Masons.
Nor would many people have thought of Palazzi as a Zionist the day he had his picture proudly taken next to Lebanon's Hezbollah spiritual leader, Shaykh Fadlallah:
Palazzi with Hezbollah leader Shaykh Fadlallah (click on image to enlarge)
Palazzi was certainly not a Zionist when he used to go to Turkey to attend the meetings of the Islamic party of Necmettin Erbakan. Nor was he a Zionist to any extent when his small magazine Comunità Islamica used to regularly publish on the front page the same appeal, issue after issue:
"No Muslim can accept that even a single clod of the HOLY LAND be subject to trading and sold at a vile price, or that the legitimacy of the Zionist presence in Palestine be recognized."
Clearly he was against the Oslo agreement in those days too; but from the other side.
The very first issue of Palazzi's magazine hosted an article significantly titled "HOLOCAUST? NO THANKS!". The author (then a very loyal follower of Palazzi, today an equally loyal follower of the extremist Adel Smith) wrote:
"We believe the time has come for Muslims, and for all people endowed with free will, to forcibly overthrow and unmask what is probably the most colossal lie in human history: the lie of the 'holocaust' [...]
In other words, THEY INVENTED YESTERDAY AND CONTINUE TO INVENT TODAY A GENOCIDE WHICH ACTUALLY NEVER TOOK PLACE, IN ORDER TO DISGUISE THE PAST, PRESENT AND PERHAPS FUTURE IMPLEMENTATION OF A REAL GENOCIDE: THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE BY THE STATE OF ISRAEL, BY WORLD ZIONISM AND BY ITS ALLIES.
The next time, GOD willing, we will speak about the 'diary' of Anna Frank".
Palazzi's magazine kept its word: the next issue devoted no less than six full pages to an abstract from a booklet by Ditlieb Felderer, published by the nostalgic "Edizioni La Sfinge", under the title: "ANNE FRANK'S DIARY: A FRAUD". The discovery of this Holocaust-denier article made quite a scandal, with articles in the daily press claiming that the "Imam of Rome" was an "anti-Semite".
Massimo Palazzi's magazine (Comunità islamica, Anno II, n. 1, January 1992,)
tells the world that Anne Frank's Diary is a "forgery" ;
the evidence, a text published by the pro-Nazi Edizioni La Sfinge
Click on picture to enlarge
Events of nearly ten years ago. Palazzi today claims that he was merely the director of the magazine, blissfully unaware of the articles published in it. Odd, considering that the articles came out in two consecutive issues of a very small magazine. Palazzi reads a lot, and it is surprising, to say the least, to think he never read the articles in his own magazine.
The Jewish community of Rome suffered atrociously during the war, and is historically progressive. One can understand, therefore, why they tend to accuse Palazzi of being a holocaust denier because of these articles. This may be excessive. Let us say he is a person who didn't mind holocaust denial until it got him in trouble with the Jewish community.
The problem is not that Palazzi has changed his opinions. It is that he certainly would never admit he did: a "Mawlana" can never be wrong. The same issue of the magazine hosting "HOLOCAUST? NO THANKS!" had an article by Palazzi titled "THE EXPERT ANSWERS". Oddly enough, as we will soon see, this expresses the same notion as the title of the section of... a Jewish website where Palazzi currently writes: "ASK THE IMAM".
When did Palazzi change his views on Zionism, or if we prefer, perform teshuva? As we can see by the date of these magazines, in 1992 he was certainly not a critic of Zionism, to put it mildly. By 1995, he had built himself a solid reputation as the Zionist Imam, at least abroad - in Italy, his supporters are to be found exclusively among a small but noisy right-wing minority of the Jewish community. Mainstream Judaism in Italy sensibly tends to prefer dialogue with Muslims who are less pliable, but who can be better counted on to represent the real Islamic community in this country. Jealousy in this regard may explain why Palazzi unceasingly calls the main Islamic organization in Italy, the UCOII, with whom Jews and Catholics regularly meet, a "terrorist organization".
However a small minority of the Jewish community, mainly known for its noisy attacks on the President of the Italian Union of Jewish Communities, prof. Amos Luzzatto, does support Palazzi. This group does not seem to mind Palazzi's stream of messages describing the mainstream Italian Jewish leadership as "Kapos sold out to Palestinian terror".
Palazzi's conversion to Zionism was by no means his only sudden change of heart. In 1993, elections were held for the position of Mayor of Rome. Palazzi campaigned for Rutelli, the progressive candidate and likely winner. Against everybody's expectation, Gianfranco Fini, leader of the small neo-Fascist MSI party, came a close second during the first ballot. Palazzi changed sides within a few hours and began launching a campaign to support Fini for the second ballot. In a rare show of loyalty, Palazzi still today is close to Fini's refurbished "Alleanza Nazionale" party, though he also flirts with media tycoon Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the small Radical Party.
Palazzi's about-turns do not only involve Zionism and politics. Today, he presents himself as a fierce enemy of the so-called Wahhabist current in Islam. In his usual excommunicatory style, he writes:
"None of the sects which preceded it had ever made such bestial affirmations regarding Allah the Almighty as those spread by the Wahhabites in their sectarian propaganda".[4]
On his website (
http://members.xoom.virgilio.it/amislam/shia.htm), he is especially disparaging about the deceased Wahhabi preacher, ‘Abdu-l-‘Aziz Ibn Baz, whose very title of "Mufti" he puts between quotation marks: The following writers are representatives of this [Wahhabi] cult. Their followers call them "Shaykhs", and Muslims must stay away from their books, papers and Web pages, and do not confuse them with real Sunni scholars: [...] ‘Abdu-l-‘Aziz Ibn Baz (the deceased official "Mufti" of the Saudi regime and their Rabitah, who oppressed Ahlu-s-Sunnah in al-Haramayn).
In this case, his turnabout was too fast even for himself. In fact, on another website of his, Palazzi proudly claims (
http://www.flashnet.it/users/fn034463/) that his own title as an Islamic teacher was granted by the very man every Muslim should stay away from - no ironical quotes around the title of Mufti this time: "[Palazzi was] authorized to teach Islam in Italy thanks to a degree by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Shaykh Abdulaziz Bin Baz"
And it was certainly out of gratitude to Bin Baz that about ten years ago Palazzi wrote, with his usual irate enthusiasm:
"[those who claim that Wahhabism is a heterodox sect] and express themselves in such a senseless fashion, clearly do not realize that they are letting themselves be used as docile tools of anti-Islamic propaganda, which has always hurled the worst lies on the 'Puritan Wahhabites, enemies of progress'. Certainly, the forces of misbelief fear the teaching based on the Koran and the Sunnah, that is the Islam preached by °Abdu '1-Uahhàb [Abdul Wahhab] and by the wise Sunnis".[5]
In all his moves, what kind of following has Palazzi been able to build up? That will be the subject of the following chapters.
FOOTNOTES
[1] La Repubblica March 19, 2000).
[1] PeaceWatch Vol. 1 #11 Aug 25, 1998.
[2] Dean E. Murphy, "Terror Label No Hindrance to Anti-Arab Jewish Group", The New York Times, 19 dic. 2000
[3] X-Sender:
fn034463@mbox1.flashnet.it X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1
Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2002 16:49:54 +0200
To:
islamic@libero.it From: Istituto Culturale della Comunità Islamica Italiana
Subject: Fwd: Propaganda dell'estremismo wahhabita in Italia
[4]In Comunità Islamica, year I, pages 25-27.
NEXT (
http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi/gb/palazzi07_gb.htm) PREVIOUS (
http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi/gb/palazzi05_gb.htm) ITALIAN LANGUAGE VERSION
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http://www.ifrance.com/amipalazzi/index.html)
Abdul Rahman T.