Jews who emigrated to the Middle East between the first and second world wars had a secret “plan” to take over what is now Israel, and eventually “will be demanding” the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a Muslim imam said in a southern California mosque on Friday.
“Between World War I and World War II, so much of the immigration that came from Europe toward the Islamic world, whether North Africa or the Mediterranean area – Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and all of this … Muslims were opening their homes and saying: Those are our brethren, persecuted by the Christians in Europe,” Syrian-born Sheikh Mahmoud Harmoush said at the Islamic Center of Riverside, according to a transcript published by the Middle East Media Research Institute. A video of the sermon was first uploaded to the YouTube account of the Islamic center, which is where Syed Rizwan Farook, who carried out the December 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attacks with his wife, worshiped.
“The Jews were coming from Germany, Poland, Italy, and everywhere else, and [the Muslims] would give them rooms, shelter them, and help them out, not knowing that there was a plan,” Harmoush continued, omitting mention of atrocities that were carried out against Jews at the time, including the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the 1929 Hebron and Safed massacres, and the Arab riots of 1936.
“Within the thirty years between the two incidents, until 1948 and the British occupation, everything was plotted to take over that beautiful land, in the way that we all know – with killing, crime, and massacres,” he claimed.
“Dear brothers and sisters, the conflict is not only in Palestine. They are going there, and they will be demanding that next,” Harmoush continued. “I promise you, it is not only Palestine. If you are going to be like that, most of the Middle East, and even, as I said, Mecca and Medina… They will say: ‘Muhammad has died. He left only daughters.’ Muhammad died, and he left female children, who cannot fight. Then they will call, in their fighting: ‘Oh, we will take revenge for Khaybar.’ Where is Khaybar?” he asked, referring to the Muslim battle against Jews in an Arabian town of that name in 629 CE. “They will go back to it. They will make every Muslim pay, one way or the other,” he added.
In an implicit call to violence, Harmoush then urged, “Wake up, it is time to be a Muslim. Prayer is not the only thing.”
“Oh Allah, liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque and all the Muslim lands from the unjust tyrants and the occupiers,” he prayed, “Oh Allah, destroy them, they are no match for You. Oh Allah, disperse them, and rend them asunder. Turn them into booty in the hands of the Muslims.”
In his Friday sermon last week, another California imam, Ammar Shahin, called on Allah to “liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews …. count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one. Do not spare any of them.” That same day, a Palestinian terrorist murdered three members of an Israeli family—Yosef Salomon, 70, and his children Chaya Salomon, 46, and Elad Salomon, 36—in their home.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned both imams on Tuesday, saying that they “spewed angry and hateful invective toward Jews.”
Harmoush has previously taught Arabic at Crafton Hills College. Inquiries to Claremont Lincoln University and California State University San Bernardino, where he has also taught, were not answered at the time of publication.
[Photo: Islamic Center of Riverdale / YouTube]