The organizers included the The Muslim American Society (MAS) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), plus naturally CAIR. The conference, which ran at the end of December, was supposed to be about peace and tolerance. The organizers even let it be known that they take antisemitism very seriously…
Imam Mahdi Bray, executive director of MAS Freedom, had posted a statement saying that the conference would “focus on positive solutions involving issues of hate, violence and intolerance.” Mr. Bray agreed that some remarks at the conference — which had 4,000 attendees and 100 speakers — were “over the top” and that he had complained to the chairman of one session. But he said his group denounced any such statements. “We take any attack on the Jewish community or anti-Semitism as serious,” the imam said.
… so obviously there’s no way anti-American incitement and/or anti-Jewish bigotry made their way into the program:
Rafiq Jaber, former president of the Islamic Association of Palestine, described Jews to the audience as “the worst kind of people,” who came to Jerusalem “with false pretenses.”… The ADL cited Hamed Ghazali, chairman of the MAS Council of Islamic Schools and professor at the Islamic American University in Michigan, as telling the audience in Arabic that “Allah gave us the Jews”… Other speakers — specifically Egyptian Sheik Raghib Al Serjani — argued that the eradication of the state of Israel is a religious duty… Materials sold… included books and CDs by anti-Semitic sheiks such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a leading Muslim Brotherhood leader based in Qatar who is known for terrorist connections. Another radical cleric whose wares were available… was Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric who has encouraged American Muslims to wage jihad against the U.S. He has been tied to Fort Hood shooting suspect Maj. Nidal Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
The MAS folks, for their part, are shocked anyone thinks their speakers were being specifically antisemitic. At first I thought they were being absurd but from a certain perspective they kind of have a point. The stuff about waging anti-American jihad was a running and prominent theme throughout the conference – apparently we’re on Allah’s land – but that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with Jews.
And the stuff about destroying Israel can’t be “over the top” either. Sure it might sound antisemitic to de facto advocate the massacre of millions of Jews, a vital prerequisite to destroying the Jewish State. But “Palestine from the river to the sea” has been a staple of MAS organizing for years, and MAS is committed to combating intolerance, so that can’t be intolerant. QED.
Maybe the ADL was talking about those specific exhortations to attack Jews. Or the eschatological promises of humiliating and subjugating Jews. Or those denigrating descriptions of Jews. But that all seems so nit-picky, don’t you think?
References:
* Jewish group rips Islamic summit – Washington Times
* Muslim-American Organizations’ Anti-Radicalization Effort ‘A Sham’ [ADL]
* Leftists, Muslim American Society at rally calling for destruction of Israel [Jihad Watch]
Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Multiculturalism
* Political Islam
* Islamic Antisemitism
