I say: This is because a companion exerts a pull, and one’s disposition is thievish. Hence, hadiths have come one after another forbidding living near unbelievers, mixing with them, and residing among them; they are well known. Therefore, we have—and still do—advise Muslims not to settle in the lands of the polytheists, especially those among them who are morally and deceitfully unrestrained, such as the Jews in America, for example, and even in the Palestine they occupy, because of their immorality and depravity, and their laxity in matters of chastity—things for which they are well known. Their contagion has become apparent among some of the Muslims living alongside them in Haifa, Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and other lands which they occupied and overpowered: there is no prayer, propriety, or modesty, to the point that one can scarcely distinguish a Muslim girl from a Jewish girl because of their great resemblance in immodest display.

Travellers there also observe that the farther Muslims’ homes are from the aforementioned lands, the less they are affected and led astray by the fitnah caused by the Jews and by their night-time raids on homes. The accounts of this are well known; none denies them except an obstinate, defiant rejecter. Were it not for lack of space, we would recount very many of them. On this occasion, I say:

This religiously established fact, on the one hand, and this regrettable reality, on the other, have been ignored by a group of people driven by whims and blind partisanship, foremost among them that “poor man”—and truly poor he is—who turned it into a fierce war against the writer of these lines because he advocated that Palestinian Muslims emigrate from the Jews’ oppression and tyranny to an Islamic land where they could find reassurance and deliverance from their corruption. This was in a sermon he delivered at the Hamzah Mosque in Amman on Friday, the twentieth of Dhu al-Hijjah, 1413 AH. He turned it into a political sermon serving his own forthcoming electoral interests, from which none of those listening to the sermon could gain any knowledge or admonition; rather, it only planted enmity and hatred in their hearts against a Muslim brother, whom the preacher slandered with what was not in him, claiming that he “calls for the occupied lands to be emptied, so that they may become exclusively for the Children of Israel”! Then he began hurling every vile accusation at him, saying: