Syrian Jihadi Secures U.S. Visa After Endorsing Suicide Bombings -- PatDollard.com, Big Peace

Excerpted from BIG PEACE: A Syrian sheik who labeled all Jews as legitimate targets for suicide bombers and who supports the death penalty for homosexuals is the latest extremist Muslim cleric raising money for Syrian-American groups supporting dictator Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.

Sheik Mohammad Rateb al-Nabulsi is in the middle of an 11-city tour across America on co-sponsored by the Syrian American Council (SAC) and the Wylie, Texas-based Shaam Relief.

A promotional announcement hails al-Nabulsi as “an internationally-known Muslim scholar, renowned for his scholarship of Islam, who has lent his formidable clerical authority to support human rights, tolerance and respect for all.”

But tolerance is not part of his preaching when it comes to perceived enemies.

Asked about Palestinian suicide bombings in April 2001, al-Nabulsi said he was “too insignificant to give a Sharia ruling or fatwa.” Instead, he extensively cited from two previous fatwas from radical clerics which bless such attacks.

“All the Jewish people are combatants” acceptable as targets for attacks in Israel, al-Nabulsi wrote in his “ruling on martyrdom operations in Palestine.”

“They do not have a career that a military rank does not encounter: doctor, pilot, engineer, for example, is a tank commander. Every civilian, citizen,” he wrote. “They do not have a regular army; they have a reserve army, and all the people can fight, so this is essentially an entirely aggressive entity from A to Z. This is the Sharia ruling.”

Al-Nabulsi’s comments on suicide bombings remain on his website.

Suicide bombings are acceptable because of the overwhelming disadvantage Palestinians have in fighting Israel, he said. And they are effective.

“Therefore beware, the enemy calls the operations suicide, they say: suicide operation to deceive
Muslims, that this is suicide, but we should call them martyrdom operations. A young man in the prime of his years sacrifices his life and shakes an entity,” he wrote. “There is frightening talk. Soon tourism in Israel has become zero; soon immigration to Israel became thirty percent from the impact of these actions. It fell thirty percent. Keep Reading

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