Established in 1963 by the Muslim Brotherhood — the inspiration for al-Qaeda and Hamas — the Muslim Students Association was listed in documents written by a Muslim Brotherhood operative and seized by the FBI in 2007 as an organization to help “destroy Western civilization from within.” According to a February 2008 New York Times article, the MSA was financed by Saudi Arabia when it first began appearing throughout North America in the late 1950s and “pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam.”
Extremism is a systemic problem with the Muslim Students Association network. For example, Sheikh Khalid Yasin, who has spoken at a multitude of campuses throughout the country and at events at the MSA National level, has denied al-Qaeda was involved in 9/11 and believes that homosexuals should be killed in accordance with the Koran. Norman Finkelstein, who has also spoken for various Muslim Students Association groups, has been featured at the University of Maryland, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, and many others. Imam Abdul Alim Musa, a radical imam and founder of the As Sabiqun (Arabic for “The Vanguard”) movement, has been featured at UC Irvine, MIT, Mount Holyoke College, and other campuses.
Therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Muslim Student Union chapter at the University of Southern California (USC) acts in accordance with its sister chapters, and until recently hosted a violent quote in the “compendium” of hadiths on the USC Muslim Students Association page. The quote advocates massacring Jews as a pathway of redemption for Muslims, and reads as follows:
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center worked with the Simon Wiesenthal Center to draft a letter to Alan Casden, a USC trustee, about the “hadith of hate,” as it is often called. Disturbed that a call for genocide should be on the USC server, Casden contacted Provost Chrysostomos Nikias to express his concern. Nikias investigated the matter and sent Casden the following letter:
The passage you cited is truly despicable and I share your concerns about its being on the USC server. We did some investigations and I have ordered the passage removed.
The passage in the hadith that you brought to our attention violates the USC Principles of Community, and it has no place on a USC server.
The University of Southern California, a private university, has strict Principles of Community which state, in part: “No one has the right to denigrate another human being on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, etc. We will not tolerate verbal or written abuse, threats, harassment, intimidation, or violence against person or property.” No student group other than the Muslim Students Association has posted any kind of material, religious or otherwise, calling for the destruction of a race or group.
USC’s decision to remove the hadith from the school’s server marks the first time that an American university has recognized that the Muslim Students Association’s agenda involves the promotion of ethnic hatred. It is also the first time that an administrator has acted to remove “despicable” material.
A statement issued by the Muslim Student Union at USC suggested that the hadith was being taken out of context and called the school’s decision to remove it from the website “unprecedented and unconscionable.” The Muslim Student Union accused the USC administration of practicing unfair censorship. However, following the controversy with the Danish cartoons, Muslim students called for censorship and protested at several universities, including UC Irvine, when the cartoons were unveiled in an academic seminar. The protests included MSA students from various universities, including USC.
Moreover, although the provost ordered the removal of the more accessible versions of the hadiths calling for slaughtering of Jews and the one that was brought to his attention, the same quote still appears in different variations in Bukhari on the USC MSA website and are difficult to locate unless one knows what they’re looking for:
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:
Allah’s Apostle said, “You (i.e., Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, ‘O ‘Abdullah (i.e., slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.'”
Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177:
Narrated Abu Huraira:
Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”
Just in case these vanish, here are some screen shots:
The hadith also appears in another variation later along in Bukhari:
Volume 4, Book 56, Number 791:
Narrated ‘Abdullah bin ‘Umar:I heard Allah’s Apostle saying, “The Jews will fight with you, and you will be given victory over them so that a stone will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me; kill him!'”
These quotes appear in more than one location, as is traditional in Islamic theology and an indication of authenticity. Since early 2008 the Muslim Students Association has been asked to repudiate this genocidal hadith and terrorist organizations by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Every individual MSA chapter has failed to repudiate the genocidal imperative contained within the hadith and has also failed to condemn terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
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