Israel-hater Marc Lamont Hill has expressed his extreme sadness over the death of one Mousa Qous:
I thought Mousa Qous’ name seemed familar, so I checked, and discovered he was mentioned in a report on ‘Afro-Palestinians’, which I covered all the way back in 2017.
Afro-Palestinians reside in various Palestinian cities, with large communities in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho.
Some are the descendants of slaves or soldiers brought in during Ottoman times. The forefathers of Jerusalem’s African Quarter are mostly Muslim pilgrims from Chad, Sudan, Nigeria and Senegal who settled here or got stuck during periods of war.
“My father came from Chad, from the Salamat tribe,” said Mousa Qous, 55, director of the African Community Society, a grassroots center that serves black Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Standing under posters of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela, he said his father came to Jerusalem on a religious pilgrimage in 1959 and “then decided to stay to fight in the 1967 war.”
Others came with The Arab Salvation Army, an army of volunteers that fought on the Arab side in the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation.
“We are originally Nubians from Aswan,” in southern Egypt, said 30 year-old Hanan Bersi.
Some still have their ancestors’ identification documents, like Ibrahim Firawi, whose grandfather came from Sudan’s western region of Darfur.
“We have documents and letters, and even tried to contact the Sudanese Embassy in Jordan to help connect us with family in Sudan,” he said. Showing off his father’s old passport, he said he has not been able to track down any of his relatives.
Historic Palestine was a crossroads for different cultures, and some Palestinians trace back their roots to a range of non-Arab groups, from Kurds to Indians and Afghans. Afro-Palestinians were denied Jordanian citizenship after the 1967 war, as they were not seen as Palestinians.
In other words, Mousa, like the other ‘Afro-Palestinians,’ has no ancestry from Israel, and is a descendant of an actual colonizer.
Yet Lamont Hill calls him “a son of Jerusalem’s African Quarter”, as if he belongs here. At the same time, Lamont Hill calls us the colonizers who do not belong here, despite me managing to get him, in our debate over a year ago, to admit Jews were here first:
His argument has been that despite there being a Jewish presence since 70CE, most of the Jews now in Israel are descended from a more recent immigration from the late 1800s and later. Yet even if we were to ignore the fact that we all ultimately descend from the Israelites, even the more recent Jewish immigrants preceded this “son of Jerusalem’s African Quarter”‘s father in Israel.
Other things you should know about Mousa Qous: He was imprisoned for 4 years for being a member of terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). While it is not clear whether or not he was involved in actual terror activities, he is on record as supporting terrorism and terrorists.
Like Fatima Bernawi (who tried to murder a cinema full of Israeli civilians and for whom Lamont Hill has expressed admiration):
Fatimah Barnawi, of Nigerian origin, was the first Palestinian female prisoner after Israel occupied Jerusalem in 1967. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison but was released 10 years later as part of a prisoner exchange, only to be deported to Jordan.
He was also proud of apartheid – but only the “right” kind:
During the Ottoman Empire (1516–1918), Africans served as guardians of the mosque. They were very strict, denying access to non-Muslims. According to the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, Jerusalem’s Ottoman governor was forced to imprison the African guards just so a European guest could visit the mosque.
During the British Mandate in Palestine, which began in 1917, the Islamic Waqf leased the two compounds to the Africans, largely because of their loyalty and dedication to guarding the nearby Aqsa Mosque.
and proud of the fact Afro-Palestinians were bodygaurds to Haj Amin al-Husseini, one of the most despicable antisemites in palestinian Arab history.
Not everyone agreed with the decision, though. Four Jerusalemite families petitioned the British High Commissioner, objecting to the arrangement, but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, whose six bodyguards were of African descent, tipped the scales with Waqf authorities and the property was leased to the Africans.
This African loyalty was to the death, literally. One of the Mufti’s African guards, Haj Othman Takrouri, was shot dead by British forces when he tried to stop British troops from arresting the Mufti on his way to pray in the Aqsa. Then, in 1948, the commander of the Arab League’s battalion that prevented the fall of Jabal al-Mukabber, a Jerusalem neighborhood, was Muhammad Tariq al-Afriqi, of Nigerian descent.
Lamont Hill tweeted what he did after learning about Qous death mere hours earlier, something he called “truly heartbreaking”:
Meanwhile, not even a peep out of him over other, actual heartbreaking events over the past 24 hours:
