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CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Attacks Jews in Two Speeches

Most importantly, he got his Islam right.

by
Andrew G. Bostom

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June 7, 2012 - 7:41 am
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Despite clearly demonstrated, intimate connections to the jihadist and virulently Jew-hating Muslim Brotherhood (via the Brotherhood’s affirmed Palestinian Muslim branch, the Jew-hating, jihad terrorist organization Hamas), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) persists in its Orwellian self-characterization as an “anti-discrimination” organization.

On June 3, the stalwart Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) provided video and audio extracts documenting that CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid invoked Jew-hating motifs in a recent May 25 sermon, and in an earlier January speech.

As the IPT report notes, Dawud asked, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah?” during his May 25 sermon at the Islamic Organization of North America mosque in Warren, Michigan. Dawud immediately answered his own query in Arabic: “They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”

In the January 2012 speech, Dawud claimed that when Islam’s prophet Muhammad oversaw the mass murder of the vanquished males of the Medinan Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza (accompanied by the enslavement of their women and children), it was both appropriate and not in the least bigoted, i.e., anti-Semitic. Discussing Dawud’s January 2012 Detroit speech, the IPT report observes:

“Did Muhammad order the killing of Jews?” Walid asked in a Twitter post promoting the video [of the sermon]. In response, an Islamist follower wrote, “Yes he did and I agree with it … Well isn’t treason a sentence to death.” Rather than oppose a hateful perspective, Walid merely corrected the follower and reinforced the anti-Jewish sentiment. Muhammad “didn’t order it. Sa’ad ibn Mu’aadh [one of his followers] ordered that punishment. It was a correct one.”

What the invaluable IPT documentation and analysis fails to provide, however, is the Islamic religious source context of Dawud’s remarks on each occasion. Simply put, Dawud was reiterating motifs from the Koran, hadith (words and deeds of Muhammad as recorded by his devout early Muslim companions), and sira (earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) that illustrate Islam’s canonical, mainstream Jew-hatred, repeated continuously, across space and time, since the creed’s advent until now.

Cairo’s 1000-year-old Al Azhar University and its mosque represent the pinnacle of Islamic religious education, equivalent to a Sunni Muslim Vatican. A front page New York Times story published January 10, 2009, included extracts from the Friday sermon (of 1/9/09) at Al Azhar mosque pronounced by Egyptian-government appointed cleric Sheik Eid Abdel Hamid Youssef. Referencing well-established anti-Semitic motifs from the Koran (citations provided below) Sheikh Youssef intoned:

 Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61 / 3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth. [Koran 5:33 / 5:64] They are the most evil on Earth. [5:62  /63]

For over thirteen centuries, through our contemporary era, the consistent, collective understanding of Koran 1:7 — cited by Al_Azhar’s Sheikh Youssef — is that Jews are cursed eternally for their ostensible “repeated transgressions” against the will of Islam’s deity, Allah, a few of which the good sheikh then enumerates. (Earlier, for example, in keeping with classical, mainstream Koranic interpretation, Sheikh Atiyyah Saqr, former head of Al-Azhar’s Fatwa Committee, identified at least 20 negative, inveterate traits of the Jews as described by Islam’s holy book.) It should be noted that Koran 1:7 is the last verse in the Koran’s opening sura or chapter, the Fatiha, which pious Muslims repeat up to 17 times per day, as part of their five daily prayer sessions.

Professor of Oriental Languages Bernard Carra de Vaux’s official entry on the “Fatiha” in the venerated E.J. Brill’s First Encyclopedia of Islam, 1913-1936 (republished 1987, vol. 3 p. 85), states simply:

The words almaghdoobi AAalayhim “those against whom God is enraged,” in verse 7 of the fatiha … are said to refer … to the Jews.

The Qur’an: An Encyclopedia is a modern, authoritative compendium of analyses written by 43 Muslim and non-Muslim mainstream academic experts, edited by Oliver Leaman, and published by Routledge, New York, 2006. These extracts from p. 614 serve as an irrefragable “final summary verdict” — consistent with over a millennium of definitive Muslim interpretation — on how Muslims and non-Muslims alike are to understand Koran 1:7, the Fatiha’s last verse:

[Regarding] the phrase in the daily prescribed prayers “Guide us to the straight path, to the path of those you have blessed, not of those who incurred [Your] wrath (al-Fatiha, 1:5-7.) … The Prophet [Muhammad] interpreted those who incurred God’s wrath as the Jews… The Jews, we are told [i.e., in both the Koran, and hadith] killed many of their prophets, and through their character and materialistic tendencies have contributed much to moral corruption, social upheaval and sedition in the world…[T]hey were readily misled and incurred both God’s wrath and ignominy. By interpreting the phrase “not of those who incurred [Your] wrath,”…the Prophet identified them and clarified in what way and by what beliefs and deeds a man incurs God’s wrath. This is a warning for the Muslims not to follow in the footsteps of the Jews.

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