World

Arabs, Muslims Denounce Israel

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

October 13, 2000 / 7:07 PM EDT / CBS

Muslims throughout the world joined Palestinians' "day of rage" Friday to condemn Israeli attacks in some of the worst violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in decades.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees burned effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Indonesia's Muslims stoned the U.S. Embassy and angry Egyptian worshippers called for a holy war.

CBS News Correspondent Allen Pizzey reports that the most rabid demonstrations took place in the teeming refugee camps of Lebanon, where three million inhabitants consider popular uprising their only hope now that the peace process appears dead.

"Israel has once again shown that there are no limits to its brutality," Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss said Friday, joining Arab leaders in denouncing Israel's use of tanks and helicopters against Palestinian targets Thursday.

Israel called the air strikes retaliation for the mob killing of two Israeli soldiers Thursday in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

But demonstrators across the Arab world and in Muslim communities worldwide — some in the U.S. — condemned Israel's use of force to quell violence in Jerusalem and Palestinian areas as excessive. Palestinians declared Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, a "day of rage."

After listening to a sermon on restraint and patience, worshippers at a Cairo mosque grabbed the prayer leader's microphone and called for holy war against Israel.

Soon the protest went from the Al-Azhar mosque to the streets, with some 1,000 demonstrators shouting pro-Palestinian slogans and burning Israeli flags.

Calling on Arab leaders to take a stronger stance against Israel, protesters urged Egypt, the first Arab nation to make peace with Israel, to sever all ties with the Jewish state.

They lobbed stones at riot police who blocked their march, some of them taking refuge in the mosque as police armed with batons charged into the crowd to disperse it.

Amr Moussa, Egypt's foreign minister, said such a summit involving President Clinton, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak could only take place "when Israel withdraw their troops from Palestinian territories."

Arabs also raised money for and sent medical aid to the Palestinians. The United Arab Emirates raised $22 million in a telethon Friday alone and medical supplies that arrived aboard five Arab planes were being transport from Egypt to Gaza, officials said.

At mosques in Jordan, preachers lashed out at Arab leaders and accused them of being "puppets of the Americans and the Jews." Thousands of Jordanians defied a government ban on protests and rallied in Amman to demand that their government close the embassy of "the Zionist enemy" as they waved flags of the militant Islamic group Hamas.

Palestinian youths at the Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon set fire to a Barak effigy drssed in a T-shirt splashed with red and the words "specializes in murdering children."

"Scum of the earth" was scrawled on an effigy of Albright.

In Sudan, 10,000 people demonstrated in Khartoum, hurling stones at the U.S. Embassy. A few climbed the embassy walls and waved the Palestinian flag as the crowd cheered them on with "Down, down USA! We won't be ruled by the CIA!"

Palestinian refugees in Syria demanded weapons to fight Israel.

In the Gulf island nation of Bahrain, women covered head-to-toe in long, black chadors joined demonstrators shouting "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" through streets of the island's commercial area in Manama.

Outside the largest mosque in Istanbul, Turkey, hundreds of men held funeral prayers for Palestinians killed in the recent violence.

Elsewhere in the world, hundreds of Bosnian Muslims gathered in front of UN offices in Sarajevo holding banners comparing Barak with war crimes suspect Slobodan Milosevic. Indonesian Muslims rallied outside parliament; others threw rocks at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. Seventy Islamic students clashed with police after some lobbed stones and firecrackers over an embassy fence. And two police officers were stabbed in Pretoria, South Africa, during clashes between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and police near the U.S. Embassy.