It's tempting to dismiss this story as just another lunatic fantasy from the Islamic world, but that would be a mistake.
A huge portion of the Muslim world is steeped in such delusions. And those who do not believe in them do nothing to discourage their propagation.
The Jew-hatred—and if you think it's simply anti-Zionism than you are either naive or in denial—that permeates the Arab Muslim world is simply the means by which a future genocide of the Jewish people can be justified, primarily through the destruction of the State of Israel.
And of course, every murder of a Jew by a Muslim is excused under the fashionable banner of a faux national identity—there has never been a Palestinian people, only a geographical designation invented by the Romans—when, in fact, the Arab Muslim terrorist war against the Jewish State is primarily a racist, religious war of elimination.
The Nazis pioneered this propaganda format wherein Jews are reduced to non-human status, yet at the same time, Jews are endowed with superhuman capabilities and held responsible for, well, everything: they are alternately capitalist, communist or parasite. And now, tailored to the modern yet medieval Islamist mind, witchcraft is thrown into the toxic brew. Don't try to make sense of these colliding ideas, to the Jew-hater it's all resolved in some grand conspiracy theory that no amount of rational thought can penetrate. Not surprisingly, this charge of witchcraft is just a new and novel update of the classic European Christian blood libel.
Note that this interview aired on Al-Jazeera, the, ahem, respectable CNN of the Arab Muslim world:
(MEMRI)- The following are excerpts from an interview with Walid Muhammad Hajj a Sudanese released from Guantanamo Prison, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on December 12, 2010:
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Yes. The most common method to wear down the brothers was witchcraft.
Interviewer: How did they do this?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There were, of course, Jews among the [staff of] the Guantanamo Base, and they would set traps for the guys.
Interviewer: Give me an example of witchcraft.
Snip!
Walid Muhammad Hajj: I will tell you how the witchcraft affected the guys. A person would suddenly see his brothers and sisters naked before him.
Interviewer: And they weren’t really there?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Absolutely not. It was as if he was in a different world.
Snip!
Interviewer: Did they ever use witchcraft on you?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: There was one attempt.
Interviewer: How did they do it?
Walid Muhammad Hajj: Once, when I was sleeping—on the floor, not on a bed — I suddenly felt that a cat was trying to penetrate me. It tried to penetrate me again and again. I recited the kursi verse again and again until the cat left.
Go to MEMRI for the entire interview.
