This isn’t hyperbole. The conference is unusually well advertised in English, being referred to in the media regularly as a “conference on Jerusalem,” rather than sparsely as a “conference on al-Quds,” the Arabic (and larger Islamic) term for Jerusalem. Yousef al-Qaradawi, “spiritual leader” of the Muslim Brotherhood, has held a number of conferences on Jerusalem in the last decade, hosting them around the Arab world and flying largely under the radar in terms of his media posture with the West. Researchers on the earlier Qaradawi conferences were more likely to find them under “al-Quds” than under “Jerusalem.” But the February 2012 conference is simply billed – even in a number of Arab-world English-language media – as the “conference on Jerusalem.”
Yet that doesn’t fully convey the conference’s confident tone. The conference is being given a higher profile than usual in English-language outlets, but the English transcriptions (such as the ones at the official conference website) don’t all provide the event’s full name: “International Conference for the Defense of Occupied Jerusalem.” Implied in this posture is a sense of momentum behind, and mainstreaming of, anti-Zionist themes.
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