Calls for probe against Montreal imam for anti-Semitic sermon
For 2nd time in 3 weeks, mosque in trouble for online video calling Jews killers, denying Jewish connection to Israel
MONTREAL, Canada — Police have been asked to investigate a newly found video hate sermon against Jews, the second complaint against the same mosque in three weeks.
The video, released online Tuesday by the Middle East Media Research Institute, shows Sheikh Wael Al-Ghitawi in November, 2014, delivering a sermon at the Al Andalous Islamic Center in Montreal’s St. Laurent borough against the “people who slayed the prophets, shed their blood, and cursed the Lord.”
In his sermon he said that “The [Jews] were disrespectful towards the prophets. They cursed them, maligned them, tortured them, lashed them, banished them from their homes, and even killed them. They killed the prophet Yahya, cutting him in two. They killed other prophets as well.”
The imam also rejected any Jewish rights to Jerusalem, saying that “Jerusalem is Arab and Islamic. It is our land, the land of our fathers and forefathers. We are the people most entitled to it. We will not forsake a single inch of this land.”
He said that the Jews of today are not the same people mentioned in scripture, but “Tartars, Turkish Mongols, who lived in a land called Khazaria.”
“If you examine the annals of history, you will see that the Jews do not have any historical right to Palestine,” he said.
“This is a bizarre strain of radical propaganda,” Rabbi Reuben Poupko, of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs, or CIJA, told the National Post. “It appears in the writings of Hamas and other groups like it and claims to debunk Jewish history,” he said.
He said that he did not feel that these views were endorsed by the wider Muslim community, but their “presence in this mosque needs to be investigated.”
Early last month, in an August 2014 video released on YouTube, a different imam from the same mosque is seen calling on Allah to “destroy the accursed Jews” and that they be killed “one by one.”
https://youtu.be/G_6wEZJT9dM
In reaction to that video, the mosque characterized that imam’s phrasing as “clumsy” and “unacceptable.”
In another development, CIJA issued a statement condemning a bomb threat Wednesday against Muslim students at the Montreal’s Concordia University.
Just weeks after six Muslim worshippers were gunned down at a Quebec City mosque, “the pathology of hate persists,” Poupko said in a statement co-signed by other Jewish community leaders.
