Searching for Condemnations in the Muslim World

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

After Hamas paraded the coffins of 9-month-old Kfir and 4-year-old Ariel to the cheers and jeers of its supporters, before turning over the coffins, locked with keys that did not fit to Israel, people looked for something to restore their faith in the goodness of mankind in the Muslim world.

Millions thought they found it in fake quotes from the grand muftis of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

• “What we say today in Gaza is a disgrace to Islam, an act of blasphemy against Allah,” Saudi Grand Mufti Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al-Sheikh (pictured above) reportedly claimed in one viral social media post.
• “Hamas has brought shame to Islam on a level never seen before,” Grand Mufti of Dubai Ahmed al-Haddad allegedly proclaimed.

Photos of the two Islamic religious leaders illustrated with these quotes racked up millions of views on social media. Some even found their way into news stories sourced from social media.

The problem was that the quotes were fake and never existed outside social media. The Saudi quote was soon disavowed while an Emirati journalist stated that the local media had “never heard of them” and that they were “mere rumors”.

Why did so many people spread and probably invent these fake social media posts? Because they wanted to believe that Muslim religious leaders would condemn Hamas mocking the bodies of the Jewish children it murdered and there was still some hope for decency left in the world.

But those condemnations don’t exist.

The only official statements out of Saudi Arabia and the UAE were vocal condemnations of Israel and proposals for an ‘alternative plan’ that would leave the PLO and Hamas in power under a fake ‘front government’ of technocrats.

Ahmed Al Yamahi, the UAE appointed ‘president’ of the Arab Parliament, accused Israel of a “genocidal war in Gaza” “unequivocally placed the blame for this escalation on the Israeli occupation authorities”, urged the UN to “hold the Israeli government and its settlers accountable for their crimes and violations against the Palestinian people” and and called for Arab unity to support the ‘Palestinian’ cause.

And unlike the fake grand mufti quotes, these were published directly on government sites.

The Saudi and UAE governments issued statements condemning terrorist attacks in their own countries and even some abroad, and many condemnations of Israel, none of Hamas for its treatment of the Bibas children.

Coverage in state owned media outlets sometimes read like outright Hamas propaganda.

A story in Al-Bayan, a Dubai state owned media outlet, described Hamas as having “handed over the bodies of four Israeli prisoners” while falsely claiming that they were “killed in deliberate Israeli airstrikes designed to kill them”.

Al-Bayan used the term ‘Asra’ to refer to the murdered children which in Arabic tends to refer to ‘prisoners of war’ as in Koran 8:67:

“It is not for a Prophet that he should have prisoners of war (and free them with ransom) until he had made a great slaughter (among his enemies) in the land.”

While not every media story from the Saudis and Emiratis was this bad, the more sympathetic accounts tended to appear in English while the Arabic language coverage was muted or hostile.

I found no official condemnations from either Saudi Arabia or the UAE: all I could find was an interfaith panel discussion with Jewish and Muslim participants at the Dialogue of Civilizations in Abu Dhabi. The Muslim participants were veterans of dialogue with Jews and Israelis, and had expressed opposition to Hamas and Islamic terrorism against Israel.

At the panel, one Emirati participant called for a moment of silence for the Bibas children.

But such views were coming from a small group of young activists with a large presence on social media rather than from actual government officials and religious leaders. The Abraham Accords has made it possible for such views to be aired, even with government sponsorship, at interfaith events, but they are not by any means the actual position of their governments.

The single condemnation at an interfaith panel, like the fake quotes of the grand muftis, shows that there is no larger rejection of the Hamas coffin spectacle in the Muslim world. The distaste for Hamas in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, as well as in other parts of the Arab world, have nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood.

The UAE offered an initial condemnation of the Oct 7 attacks followed by a long string of condemnations of Israel throughout the war including support for war crimes charges.

And the UAE was the least bad of them all.

The unfortunate truth is that there is very little opposition to Muslim terrorism unless it’s directed at fellow Muslims. ISIS has the highest margin of Muslim opposition not because it burned people alive and raped little girls, but because it declared a caliphate and treated all Muslims who refused to acknowledge its supremacy as heretics and infidels. Al Qaeda enjoyed wide support in the Muslim world when it was flying planes into skyscrapers, but once it bombed a hotel wedding in Jordan and began a civil war in Iraq, its popularity diminished among Muslims.

The UAE turned on the Muslim Brotherhood after it plotted to seize power. The Saudis joined the crackdown on the Brotherhood a year later. But a few years before all this, there had been an uproar over the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

The Saudis and the UAE distrust Hamas because of its sponsorship by their enemies, Qatar and Iran, and its origins as a Muslim Brotherhood organization, but their objections have nothing to do with its killing of Israelis of whatever age or opposition to terrorism as a general principle.

After the atrocities of Oct 7, Saudi approval ratings for Hamas rose from 10% to 40%. 95% of Saudis polled did not believe that Hamas had killed civilians. The vast majority of Saudis opposed improving relations with Israel and believed that it would eventually be destroyed.

Expecting the Grand Mufti to condemn Hamas is a fantasy. As is Saudi normalization.

The Abraham Accords is at best a regional alliance against common enemies in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, and not based on a deeper friendship or a recognition of mutual humanity. Those desperate to believe otherwise have been forced to invent fake condemnations to substitute for the real ones that should have been issued, but weren’t and never will be.

Americans and Israelis have spent too long living in a fantasy world when it comes to peace in the Middle East. Fake quotes are no substitute for dealing with the reality of Islamic terrorism. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.