Introduction
Palestinian Authority leaders and the official PA media have long presented America as an enemy of Islam and the US war on terror as a war against Islam. This promotion continues unabated today, in spite of the American political and financial support of new PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

This week, a religious leader whose salary is paid by the PA added a new accusation to the standard attacks on American policy by preaching that the US war effort in Iraq and elsewhere, including "Palestine," attempts to force Muslims to convert to Christianity. He said US actions today were crueler than those of a Christian Caesar who, according to Islamic tradition, dipped a Muslim into boiling oil in order to force his conversion to Christianity.

In addition, an old accusation was repeated in an article in the official PA daily this week. The writer states that the true enemy of the Arabs is not Israel but the US, and that Israel is merely an arm of the US in its imperialist wars. In this article the US is accused of "grinding the bones" of Palestinian children, "devouring their eyes."

It is important to note that the inflammatory sermon comes only a few weeks after the PA leadership announced it would review the Friday sermons to remove incitement and hateful content.

The following are the two items from this week´s PA media:

Friday sermon on PA TV

"Our prisoners are subjected to most criminal kinds of physical torture. They are tied with chains and trussed up with iron chains, and hung by their feet from the ceiling, like animals are hung after slaughter for days. Many of them lose consciousness. Our prisoners are exposed to beating, electricity and fire tortures.

"The prisoners are exposed to conversion to Christianity, to abandoning religion, [as it was] in the distant past and recently. Yes, our prisoners are forced to curse Muhammad; our prisoners are forced to curse the religion of Allah, our prisoners are forced to curse the essence of divinity.

"Haven´t you heard of our prisoners [of war] in Palestine, have you not heard of our prisoners in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and all over the world, who are exploited and imprisoned, and are offered conversion to Christianity?

"This is an old - new infidel policy. Allah´s servant, Ibn Al- Hudhafa Al-Sahmi, totally refused this. The [Christian] Caesar told him: ´We shall dip you in boiling oil´. He answered: ´Do as you wish´. He arrived with two Muslims and was dipped in boiling oil until his flesh separated from his bone. But what the Caesar did was not as bad as what his followers do, the missionaries of freedom and democracy of today. In the name of Allah, what Caesar did, dipping Muslims in boiling oil, was one hundred thousand times lighter than what their soldiers are doing today to our wives and daughters in Iraq, in Palestine, in Guantanamo and in Abu Gharib.

"What Caesar did is not as bad as five American soldiers who meet to rape one of our daughters, a girl who has the honor of a Muslim woman, in order to desecrate her honor at the Abu-Gharib prison."
[Sheikh Ibrahim Mudayris, PA TV, April 15, 2005]

Article from official PA daily newspaper

"Seventeen years (since the assassination of the fighter Abu Jihad) that the murderous millstones of America have been turning, grinding the bones of our children and devouring their eyes. Not Israel! There is no such thing called Israel! It is America repeating upon us, the Arabs, the tragedy of the Indians [sic] from the dawn of her [American] history that began with this first crime of genocide."
[Article by Said "Abu Ajima," Al Hayat Al Jadida, April 16, 2005]