For Muslims in other parts of the world, inflammatory outrage — often based on spurious charges — against Israel, has always been given immediate priority, while serious human rights violations by Muslim nations, dictators, and mobs are shrugged off as problems “over there.”
This silent refusal by many Muslims to condemn attacks that are openly inspired by Islam does not come from aggression, but from a fear of challenging religious authority or needfully holding our own community accountable. In a post-Trump era, Muslims are not worried about what Jews, Americans or a new administration will do. Many of us fear first and foremost our own community for the ostracism and harassment we risk if we rise as a dissenting voice.
Extremist ideology will only change once we remove the imams and the mosque leadership who are complicit and who have unfettered access to a powerful platform. These are not people of faith; they are not spiritual leaders. They are dangerous propagandists and they need to be removed.
From Lebanon to Norway — now most recently in California — pulpits at mosques are ripe with raw Jew-hate. This hate is not denounced by the immediate community. When news broke recently that Imam Ammar Shahin of the Islamic Center in Davis, California, delivered a one- hour war-drum sermon against Jews concerning the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the imam and the members of mosque stood shamelessly behind his bidding to “Liberate the Al Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews. Annihilate them down to the very last one.”
That is a call for genocide.
On the same day, in front of a congregation of Friday worshippers, another imam, Mahmoud Harmoush, in Riverside, California, also gave a Jew-hating sermon. Harmoush openly said:
“Oh, Allah, liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque and all the Muslim lands from the unjust tyrants and the occupiers… Oh, Allah, destroy them, they are no match for you. Oh, Allah, disperse them and rend them asunder. Turn them into booty in the hands of the Muslims.”