Sheikh Muhammad bin Musa Al Nasr is captured in a YouTube video dated Dec. 23, 2016, addressing a prayer meeting at Dar Al-Arqam in Montreal East. (screenshot from cjnews.com)
More videos of anti-Jewish sermons being delivered in mosques in Canada have come to light, the latest from the Dar Al-Arqam mosque in Montreal and the Al-Hikmah mosque in Toronto.
Sheikh Muhammad bin Musa Al Nasr is captured in a 20-minute YouTube video dated Dec. 23, 2016, addressing a prayer meeting at Dar Al-Arqam in Montreal East.
According to a translation of the Arabic by the Toronto-based online publication CIJNews, he says Jews are “the most evil of mankind” and that Allah has ordained that they be killed by Muslims.
“At the end of time when the Muslims will triumph over the most evil of mankind [and] the human demons, the stone and the tree will say: O Muslim, O servant of Allah, O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews,” the translation says.
Musa Al Nasr is identified as a visiting Jordanian cleric.
Similar messages have been delivered by Sheikh Abdulqani Mursal, an imam at Al-Hikmah in North York, reports CIJNews editor Jonathan Halevi, who is described as a reserve lieutenant-colonel in the Israel Defence Forces and a senior researcher of radical Islam at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs.
Apparently drawing from Islamic scripture, Mursal taught that “the fate of the Jews is … to be killed by Muslims,” Halevi writes.
He read a hadith, or saying of Muhammad, that: “You will fight against the Jews and you will kill them until even a stone would say: Come here, Muslim, there is a Jew [hiding himself behind me], kill him.”
Whatever the source of these sentiments, Jewish groups decry them as hateful, incitement, possibly hate crimes.
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) said the published excerpt of Musa Al Nasr’s talk “mirrors, word for word, a similar genocidal declaration” in the charter of Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Canada.
“We are deeply troubled and angered that yet another imam has dehumanized Jews and glorified violence against them,” stated CIJA Quebec co-chair Rabbi Reuben Poupko.
Even more disturbing, he said, is that the mosque would disseminate Musa Al Nasr’s “incitement to violence and hatred” on the internet.
CIJA has submitted the latest material to police to determine if it violates Canada’s Criminal Code.
“We condemn these appalling sermons which … are a dangerous rejection of Canada’s core values of tolerance, pluralism and non-violence,” he said. “In light of similar incidents recently exposed in Montreal and Toronto, there is a real concern that the airing of hateful rhetoric – including antisemitism – has become routine at some mosques.”
B’nai Brith Canada has filed a formal complaint with police because it believes that this is hate speech. Musa Al Nasr is a “prominent member of the hardline Salafist movement in Jordan, where he lectures at the al-Ahliyya University in Amman,” it asserts.
According to B’nai Brith’s research, he delivered lectures more than a dozen times at Al-Arqam, which were recorded and uploaded on YouTube.
B’nai Brith chief executive officer Michael Mostyn expressed frustration that police have yet to lay charges in connection with a complaint it made in February when a video was exposed of another imam at another Montreal mosque pleading for the death of Jews.
The 2014 sermon by Sayed AlGhitawi, a guest imam at the Al-Andalous Islamic Centre, called on Allah “to destroy the accursed Jews” and “kill them one by one.”
“When will Canada finally recognize that we are not immune to racism and antisemitism, and that it is this type of rhetoric that directly leads to radicalization all over the world?” Mostyn asked. “What will it take before charges are laid for criminal incitement in Canada?”
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