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Arrest Warrant Issued For Imam Who Called For Jews To Be Killed

Canadian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a Palestinian-Jordanian imam who made anti-Semitic statements at a mosque in Montreal last year, the Montreal Gazette reported Sunday.

Sheikh Muhammad ibn Musa Al Nasr is being charged with willful promotion of hatred. In his guest lecture in December 2016 at the Dar Al-Araqm mosque, he called Jews “the worst of mankind.” Other elements were also objectionable, according to translations of the sermon from Arabic by the Canadian Jewish website CIJNews:

At the end of time when the Muslims will triumph over the most evil of mankind (and) the human demons, the stone and the tree will say: O Muslim, O servant of Allah, O Muslim, O servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

(Similar language, which is derived from Muslim holy texts, was also used in the charter of the Palestinian terror group Hamas).

“Today, the Jewish community of Montreal can sleep safer, knowing that there is a price to pay for inciting violence against our community,” the CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, Michael Mostyn, told the Gazette. “This incident and others like it demonstrate that antisemitism, especially in the guise of religion, remains a serious problem in Canada today.”

According to B’nai Brith, the mosque has yet to apologize for hosting the imam (though other Canadian Muslim organizations did condemn the sermon). As of publication of this article, the sermon is still available on the mosque’s YouTube page.

Al Nasr’s whereabouts are currently unknown, the Gazette reported.

Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink.

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