Outrage! Preaching at Montreal Mosque, Imam Calls for Jews to be Killed

The Montreal Muslim community is outraged by preaching by an invited imam that called for Jews to be killed. The imam apparently recited verses that call for the deaths of Jews when he gave a sermon at a local mosque, according to a report by CBC News.

"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, 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," says the verse, according to a translation by the Canadian branch of the global Jewish service organization B'nai B'rith.

The imam who delivered the sermon is Sheikh Muhammad bin Musa Al Nasr, a cleric from Jordan; he was invited to the Dar Al-Arqam Mosque in Montreal as a guest preacher. His sermon caught the attention of B'nai B'rith, which filed a complaint with the police.

"This is inciting violence, and this is inciting radicalization," said Harvey Levine, regional director of B'nai B'rith in Quebec. "It's against the law and has to be stopped."

The sermon also caused outrage among the wider Muslim community. President of the Muslim Council of Montreal Salam Elmenyawi has said he wants to know why the imam was invited and that the mosque should apologize.  

Dar Al-Arqam Mosque is one of the few Montreal mosques not represented by the council.

According to the CBC, the verse comes from the hadith, a collection of religious texts that record and interpret the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.

According to Imam Ziad Asali of the Association of Islamic Charitable Projects, the hadith in question is one of more than 100,000 that are written in many books. Some are considered authentic; others are not.

"To use the themes of the Prophet to spread hatred is actually something that is disrespectful towards the Prophet himself," Asali said.

Asali said that there are mosques in Canada that embrace extremist messages and incite hatred systematically.

"These people, not only do they show hatred towards non-Muslims, they even show hatred to us Muslims," he said.

Police have confirmed that they received the complaint, but they also said they are already investigating a similar complaint about the mosque filed about a month ago.