“He’s been inciting hatred against Jews”. Poignant words from a sensible Muslim couple from Vancouver in a National Post article (subscription required).
Vancouver residents Rahat Kurd, 34, and her husband Hanif Abdul Karim, 40, Muslims, have strived for the past couple of years to quell the kind of hate-speech that “endangers all Muslims,” says Mrs. Hurd.
It was learned last week that a Vancouver man reportedly killed in Chechnya frequently attended the Dar al-Madinah Islamic Society mosque in East Vancouver, led by cleric Sheik Younus Kathrada. He seems to preach hatred against Jews and Christians. He called Jews “brothers of the monkeys and the swine” in a tape-recorded lecture.
“Why do we hate the Jews?” he asks an article in one of his newsletters. “We hate them for the sake of our Lord. We hate them for the sake of Allah because they slandered Allah and they killed and slandered his prophets.”
“What he and his mosque have been publishing and saying is grotesque to the point of farce,” Ms. Kurd said in an interview on Friday from her Vancouver home.
“He’s been inciting hatred against Jews. It’s so egregious. And it’s against the law. He’s a toxic element in the community and we felt we had to do more than have our silent disagreements; we had a responsibility to confront him.”
When twenty Vancouver Muslims led by Kurd and Karim wrote to the Dar Al-Madinah Islamic Society and demanded that such “hate-filled, racist” statements be retracted, Sheik Kathrada responded in a letter that he and the members of his mosque “do not feel the D’awah Letter was filled with hate-filled material … it was filled with truths and realities.”
But this is where, so often, decent reporting of a story falls off and becomes bad reporting: The last paragraph in the story is this:
Although many Muslims in Canada are angry about the Israeli government’s policies towards Palestinians, Ms. Kurd said they appreciate Canada is a pluralistic country and resist being resentful toward all Jews. For one thing, she said, Canadian Muslims know all Jews don’t share the views of Israel’s current leadership.
‘Scuse me? Does she mean that those who support the current leadership of Israel (which was democratically elected by a plurality of Israel’s votes and obviously supported by large numbers of Canadians), are somehow more legitimate targets of the hate that the cleric espouses? She’s only outraged by the fact that the cleric espouses hatred toward “all” Jews, rather than just some?
This story really needs another sentence or two.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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