Imam Omar Suleiman is an American Muslim “thought leader” based in Houston, Texas who promulgates the same virulent, if canonical, Muslim Jew-hatred as those mentioned in my previous column.
Suleiman gave a congressional invocation on May 9, 2019, and was a participant in a high-profile “interfaith dialogue” event with J.D. Greear of the Southern Baptist Convention at North Carolina State University on March 5, 2020.
Greear and the Democrats who invited Suleiman to “prayerfully” address Congress appear to have been willfully blind to Suleiman’s open espousal of Sharia supremacism and traditionalist Islamic Jew-hatred.
Suleiman has defended sharia‘s hadd punishments for adultery (stoning) and theft (amputation). He has advocated for both “societal Sharia” and a caliphate, so that Sharia can “be applied in totality.” He has even defended Muslim concubinage and sex slavery (see this compilation of video clips).
Unsurprisingly, Suleiman is also a virulent Muslim Jew-hater, who proudly lauds Islam’s antisemitic canon, in particular the “apes and pigs” Quranic epithet (5:60) for Jews.
Suleiman’s intense canonical Islamic Jew-hatred was elaborated at length during a five-part, nearly six-hour 2012 lecture series called “Lost Chronicles of Bani Israel.” As a prelude to his discussion of Allah’s “very dramatic action” against a particular group of Jews—transforming them into apes and pigs (Quran 7:166 and 5:60)—Suleiman elucidated what characterizes “most Jews” with Quranic indelibility.
The majority of the people we are talking about obviously, to take lessons from them, we’re not gonna focus on those few good people, few bright spots, but rather focus on mistakes that they [i.e., most of the Quranic Jews] make.
The phrase “brothers of apes and pigs,” Suleiman maintained, is appropriate for most Jews, given their inveterate Quranic predilection for deceit, which attempts “to take Allah for a fool.”
Indeed, according to the earliest sacralized, pious Muslim biography of Muhammad by Ibn Ishaq, just before subduing the Jewish tribe of the Banu Qurayza of Medina, Islam’s prophet invoked this striking Quranic motif to describe the Jews’ supposed debasement, addressing the Qurayza as “You brothers of apes.”
Ibn Ishaq’s account further maintains that, upon their surrender, Muhammad himself beheaded between 600-900 of the adult Jewish males of the Banu Qurayza and enslaved their wives and children.
Objective data collected from a representative sample of 100 U.S. mosques indicates that Suleiman is hardly an outlier. The researchers assessed the prevalence of jihadist teaching and found that 81% of the mosques were deemed moderately (30%) to highly (51%) supportive of jihad violence in order to impose sharia. Just under 5% of Muslim worshippers attended mosques where jihadist materials were not provided because Sharia-compliant mosques that promote jihad were the most heavily attended.
Furthermore, as sadly expected, the Sharia materials “emphasized the inferiority of non-Muslim life” and “promoted hatred and intolerance towards non-Muslims.”
For at least the past 10 years, the ADL has meticulously documented the global pandemic of extreme Muslim Jew-hatred, which it defined as agreeing with at least six out of 11 antisemitic stereotypes. The surveys have shown that the 16 most antisemitic countries in the world are all found within the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, where the prevalence of extreme antisemitism ranges between 74%-93%—the latter among the Muslims of Gaza, and Judea and Samaria.
Ominously, in the ADL’s most recent survey, 62% of the Muslim diaspora population in France manifested extreme antisemitism. Already by 2017, 34% of U.S. Muslims expressed extreme antisemitism, approximately 2.5 times the 14% rate amongst non-Muslim Americans. What such a survey of American Muslims might show now is not a reassuring thought.
Religious leaders, beginning with American Jewish leaders, as well as elites in government, academia and the media must openly address the institutional, canonical Islam that animates the global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred. Moreover, authoritative, institutional Islam has to be admonished by intellectually honest Jews in order to purge Muslim Jew-hatred—a “Mecca-Cairo-Karbala I” process, akin to Vatican II/Nostre Aetate.
