RUTHFULLY YOURS

In December 2017, four imams — at mosques in North Carolina, New Jersey and Texas — called for killing Jews. Two of the imams quoted from a hadith that says:

“The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him”.

Two other imams, respectively, asked Allah “to destroy the Zionists and their allies, and those who assist them” and “to wreak vengeance upon the plundering oppressors”.

Prior to these December calls, in July 2017, two imams in California (Riverside and Davis) also called for killing Jews. One imam quoted the hadith above. He later apologized, claiming that “The last thing that I would do is intentionally hurt anyone, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. It is not in my heart”.

It may not be in his heart, but it was in his mouth, and it is in the Quran and the hadiths, which are filled[1] with supremacist and violent references not only to Jews, but to all non-Muslims.

Yes, other religious books are also filled with hate verses, but as the author Bruce Bawer points out, many “Muslims still live by them.”

There was, in fact, surprisingly little outrage in the United States that violent hatred is preached in certain American mosques. Hardly any media pundits, community leaders or cultural celebrities threw themselves into a frenzy over this recent display of racist supremacism, as they had done over the display of Jew-hatred by white supremacists in Charlottesville about six months ago.

The CEO of the Anti- Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, did not, this time, ask the president of the United States to “name the hate” and “devise a plan” to confront Muslim supremacy, as he had done in response to the white supremacists after Charlottesville.

The general lack of outrage was particularly noticeable given that the FBI had just released its hate crime statistics for 2016. These showed — as they have done since the FBI began to collect hate crime statistics in 1992 — that Jews were still the main target of religiously-motivated hate crimes. In 2016, Jews constituted just 1.8 percent of the American population, yet they were victims of 54.4 percent of such attacks. By comparison, Muslims, who constitute 1.1 percent of the population, were victims of 24.5 percent of religiously-motivated crimes.

Muslim supremacists are apparently acceptable; white supremacists are not.

Muslim lobbying organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which are usually the first to condemn “Islamophobia,” and which often condemn white supremacists, have also been conspicuously silent on the issue of the imams’ expressions of Jew-hate. Muslim Advocates, one of the only Muslim rights groups to react, merely called the three speeches “despicable” but “isolated.”

They actually are not isolated. Six incidents — at least, that the public knows about — in six months is not “isolated”. More significantly, in Canadian and European mosques, calls for murdering Jews have become increasingly commonplace. In Europe, such preaching has had murderous results. In Copenhagen, a Muslim listened to a sermon similar to the ones issued by the American imams, then murdered a Jewish guard in front of the city’s synagogue. Calls from imams in mosques to murder anyone should set off alarm bells that murders are in the works. Instead, these calls go largely ignored. That indifference applies as much when the calls are directed against homosexuals or other Muslims, as against Jews.

Some news outlets would have the public believe that calls for murdering Jews were linked to President Donald Trump’s December declaration on Jerusalem. Newsweek, for instance, recently wrote that calls for killing Jews was “a trend that has followed President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel”. No, calls for murdering “disbelievers” is a trend deeply rooted in Islam’s foundational texts, which are 1,400 years old.

It would be a mistake to view the hate preached against Jews differently from the hate preached against other non-Muslims. Both are sanctioned by the Quran and the hadiths. It is this hate against anyone “other” — and that is still taken to heart by many Muslims — that drives Islamic terrorism against the West.

Americans, therefore, should be greatly concerned that the reactions of officials and the media to calls in the US since last July for murder have been so muted. Calls for jihad against all non-Muslims began in the US several decades ago.

In 1988, Osama Bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, visited and preached in Oklahoma that, “The Jihad, the fighting, is obligatory on you wherever you can perform it. The word Jihad means fighting only, fighting with the sword”.

In the 1990s, the “Blind Sheikh”, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was an imam at three separate mosques in the US. Abdel-Rahman’s sermons condemned Americans as the “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists”. He called on Muslims to assail the West, “cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land”.

Rahman was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and of planning a broader “war of urban terrorism” in the United States.

Anwar Al Awlaki, an American-born terrorist killed by an American drone strike in Yemen in 2011, was preaching and spreading his hateful message of jihad in American mosques as early as the 1990s. At the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami mosque in San Diego, between 1996-2000, two of the future 9/11 hijackers attended his sermons. He is also reported to have inspired several other terrorists, such as the Fort Hood terrorist, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, with whom he exchanged emails, and the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the 2013 Boston marathon. According to one US counter-terrorism official, speaking in September 2016, “If you were to look at people who had committed acts of terrorism or had been arrested and you took a poll, you’d find that the majority of them had some kind of exposure to Awlaki”[2].

Hatred is not only disseminated in mosques. In 1998, as documented by Steven Emerson of the Investigative Project on |Terrorism, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was the co-sponsor of a Brooklyn rally. There it was said, “…Allah says he who equips a warrior of Jihad is like the one [who] makes Jihad himself,” and a song with the lyrics: “No to the Jews, descendants of the apes” was sung.

CAIR denies co-sponsoring this rally. In September 2003 Senate testimony, the CEO and Founder of CAIR, Nihad Awad, said, “As Executive Director of CAIR, I had never heard of this event, let alone authorize sponsorship for it.” The event, however, is explicitly mentioned in the rally’s program. Nihad Awad, incidentally, at Barry University, endorsed the terrorist group Hamas:

“I used to support the PLO, and I used to be the President of the General Union of Palestine Students which is part of the PLO here in the United States, but after I researched the situation inside Palestine and outside, I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO”.

Violence and terrorism do not occur in a vacuum. Terrorism always seems to be preceded by indoctrination. Calls in US mosques for murder, while permissible under free speech protected by the US First Amendment, need to be taken seriously, not simply shrugged off.

Judith Bergman is a columnist, lawyer and political analyst.