Over the past few weeks, amid the anger over the question of illegal immigration, asylum seekers and, in particular, the separation of children from their parents, a number of American Muslim organizations with links to extremism have joined the conversation. Islamists, it appears, have been keen to exploit an important national conversation.
None has been more active than Omar Suleiman, a prominent American Salafi Muslim cleric, founder of the Yaqeen Institute and an instructor at the Al Maghrib Institute.
On June 26, Suleiman visited a U.S. detention center in Texas, with the media in tow, reflecting that:
As I was walking through, you just get this eerie feeling that you’re in what Nazi Germany must have looked like when they were just holding people, right? Because it’s warehouses that have been converted into concentration camps.
Save those children that we are unable to reach and hold their future that we are unable to control. Oh Allah let mercy be placed in our hearts minds and eyes for these children. Let us hear their cries and feel their pain and be a source of healing of their sorrows. Oh You Who is just, let us be stirred by the injustice facing the innocent children driven by the belief that their suffering is unjustified, and unafraid to stand with them against those who oppress them.
We separate children from families all the time. We separate them with drones, we separate them with bullets, we separate them with slave-holding prison systems and detention centers, all in the name of national security. This is not about national security, this is about racial purity. … Just as those children were separated from their families, they are being separated from the human family. We have to resist that. We are one human family. … We resist this bigotry and this fascism together.
Speaking before Young Muslims, the youth division of the Islamic Circle of North America, Suleiman warns Muslim girls, without condemnation, that if they are “promiscuous,” they may be killed:
Sisters ... you know what happens with a really jealous Dad? He kills you and he kills the guy. You are offending Allah ... whenever you make yourself promiscuous or you open yourself up to a relationship.
Other topics of Suleiman’s sermons includes justification of historical sex slavery, condemnation of homosexuality as a “repugnant shameless sin,” and support for gender segregation.
