At 5:00 AM on Tuesday morning, MK Orit Strook (Religious Zionist Party) took advantage of an Opposition filibuster to throw some truth bombs from the Knesset podium about MK Mansour Abbas, the head of the Joint Arab party and a member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition. 

Abbas; a member of Muslim Brotherhood

“This hour, five in the morning, is the hardest hour for me to give a speech,” Stook began. “On a normal day I go at this hour to pray in the Cave of the Patriarchs, but today I can not.” 

“[I want] to show the government, and especially the right-wing members, who are your partners who you have given the reins of the state. The intention is, of course, Mansour Abbas, who is a man of the Muslim Brotherhood, a supporter of terrorism who wants to turn Israel into two states. And we have to show at every moment why this is a dangerous government.”

Strook gave her speech while Abbas sat nearby as acting Speaker of the Knesset. She went on to read a translation of an interview given by Abbas in the Jordanian media.

“Instead of slogans, we send dozens of buses to thousands of people every day to the al-Aqsa Mosque,” Strook quoted Abbas as saying. “The Islamic Movement is a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was established as a jihad movement, and after it became clear that, at the moment, the possibility of seizing weapons and going to jihad war is impossible, then the movement engaged in social jihad”

“When we talk about land, housing, and house destruction, is it a civil issue?” she quoted Abbas. “On the contrary, it is a national issue that underlies our struggle for our homeland.”

Strook went on to make an analogy comparing Abbas’ participation in the government to the Trojan Horse described in the Aenid by Virgil as being used by the Greeks as a subterfuge to conquer the City of Troy after a fruitless 10-year siege.

“Apart from the story of Troy, which is more of a legend than history, I know of no other event in which a country put its enemies into it and gave them an inner grip so that they could destroy it from within,” Strook said. “Here they let Abbas, who is the enemy of the state take the steering wheel, which is how Bennett described it at one time. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to overthrow this dangerous government.”