From King David to American Pentecostals, boisterous worshippers have always annoyed those who prefer their worship quiet and dignified. “Stop jumping up and down—we’re Episcopalians,” said a proverbial Protestant mother to her children. But the eminent sociologist Peter Berger approves:

There is ample biblical warrant for noisy worship. Perhaps King David was the prototypical Pentecostal when he sang and danced before the Ark of the Lord as it was brought to Jerusalem, along with his men, “making merry . . . with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals . . . and with the sound of the horn.” Perhaps Mikhal, the daughter of Saul, who rebuked David for this unseemly behavior, was the prototypical guardian of properly polite etiquette. The mention of “joyful noise” is repeated in several Psalms, for example in Psalm 100: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.