Danish prosecutors charge imam for calling for the killing of Jews By Thomas Lifson
Denmark passed a law making it a crime to incite or welcome the killing of people that took effect last year, and yesterday brought charges under it for the first time, against Imam Mundhir Abdallah. One small wrinkle: he was reading to his congregation from holy scripture. The Times of Israel reports:
Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches in the Copenhagen neighborhood of Norrebro at the Masjid Al-Faruq mosque, which media have linked to radical Islam, is accused of citing a hadith or koranic narrative calling for Muslims to rise up against Jews.
“Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them,” Abdallah said in a Facebook and YouTube video post in March, according to a translation of the original Arabic provided by the US organization the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
Screen grab from MEMRI (donate here)
“These are serious statements and I think it’s right for the court to now have an opportunity to assess the case,” public prosecutor Eva Ronne said in a statement. (snip)
Ronne said it’s legal to quote religious books like the Koran and the Bible, but that inciting or welcoming the killings of people could be punishable by up to three years in prison.
Obviously, Denmark has no First Amendment protecting religious belief and speech. But one can expect all sorts of objections to criminalizing Muslim scripture, despite the undeniably hateful content of some of it. No trial date has been set, but when and if a trial comes, this may be introduced as evidence:
According to broadcaster DR, Omar El-Hussein, who was behind a series of shootings at a free-speech conference and a Jewish synagogue in Copenhagen in February 2015 which left two people dead, had visited the mosque the day before going on the rampage.
Denmark also banned six foreigners last May, based on what authorities called preaching hatred. One of them is U.S. preacher Terry Jones, who burned a Koran, not violence against persons. Violence aganst inanimate objects is not comparable to violence against persons, but if there is a need to find non-Muslims to include on the list, I guess that’t the best they can come up with.
Hat tip: John McMahon
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