The imam of a Vancouver mosque is under fire for calling on Muslims to send “money, weapons and expertise” to Palestinians to fight “Zionists” in Israel.
B’nai B’rith Canada, a Jewish organization, on Tuesday released videos in which an imam at a Kingsway mosque, Tarek Ramadan, is seen referring to Israelis as “an impure gang” and Zionists as the “worst of mankind.”
Recorded this summer, the video shows Ramadan calling on his congregation to “fight, by any means necessary” against Zionists in a jihad, or holy struggle. “We are not going to be shy or wishy-washy about it.”
The video of Ramadan’s English-language talk was obtained by an international organization called the Middle East Media Research Institute, which often exposes hate speech. One of its directors is Reid Morgan, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
B’nai B’rith is calling on Ramadan to be dismissed from his position and has filed a complaint with the Vancouver Police Department.
It also wants an inquiry held into the actions of the Muslim Association of Canada, which operates the mosque and which B’nai B’rith says shared the “offensive” sermon on its YouTube channel.
In his sermon, Ramadan says that the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which is patrolled by Israeli security officials, “should only be in the custody of the Muslims. It should not be in the custody of the Christians, the Jews or anybody else.” Zionists, Ramadan said, have “no holiness, no respect for anybody.”
Representatives of the Muslim Association of Canada could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Previous Postmedia articles have tied MAC, which has many mosques across Canada,to Hamas and other militant Middle Eastern organizations.
Ramadan himself was in the news in early 2016 after a driver pepper-sprayed refugees standing outside his mosque, at 2122 Kingsway. At the time Ramadan told the Canadian public that it “doesn’t have to be afraid of Muslims.”
The Muslim Association of Canada mosque is not a member of the B.C. Muslim Association, the main umbrella group for roughly 40,000 Sunni Muslims on the West Coast of Canada.
In a statement Wednesday, B’nai B’rith’s chief executive officer, Michael Mostyn, said, “This is an extremely serious development, especially in light of similar incidents at other mosques in Vancouver and across Canada.”
Ramadan’s controversial remarks follow a report in September about Canadian Revenue Agency allegations that a Port Coquitlam mosque, called Masjid Al-Hidayah and Islamic Cultural Centre, was “controlled or influenced” by a Qatari foundation that helped finance Hamas, which the Canadian government has declared a terrorist organization.
B’nai B’rith also filed a complaint this summer against a Jordanian cleric in Montreal, who was recorded reciting the following verse in Arabic: “O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Montreal police issued an arrest warrant for Muhammad bin Musa Al-Nasr.
In addition, B’nai B’rith pointed to the case of a Ryerson University teaching assistant, Ayman Elkasrawy, who was dismissed this year from his job after making offensive comments during a prayer service at Masjid Toronto.
In his Arabic-language sermon, B’nai B’rith Canada provided evidence Elkasrawy called on Muslims to “purify the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews.”
Such Canadian cases echo similar exposes in the US, many of which involve MEMRI obtaining and translating videos of controversial speeches and sermons by Muslim clerics.
While many people, including New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, have praised MEMRI for exposing hate speech, critics have said the Washington, DC-based organization over-focuses on extremist Muslims and largely ignores the work of moderate Muslims.
Metro Vancouver is home to more than 70,000 Muslims who follow various streams of the religion.