“A recent Islamic conference in Toronto has drawn criticism from B’nai Brith over some of its guest speakers.”
Jihad Watch also has concerns about this “controversial Islamic conference in Toronto,” as Canadian Jewish News put it. The reason why is expressed in the press release from B’nai Brith Canada. It’s because three speakers are presented who “made anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist comments in the past: Yasir Qadhi, Siraj Wahhaj and Omar Suleiman.”
“It is troubling that a major Canadian Muslim conference continues to invite extremist preachers to Canada,” Michael Mostyn, the CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said in the statement.
Unfortunately, speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth is counterproductive and dangerous in the defense against Islamic supremacism and the jihad doctrine. Yet Canadian Jewish News did just that when it lowered its journalistic standards in an article published by Ron Csillag, who ran with propaganda, lies and defamation. Good journalists and publications do not publish without solid verification. No verification should mean no article. The Csillag article entitled “Muslim professor says she was assaulted at conference” was a one-sided rendition from trouble-making Muslim professor Jasmine Zine, which Robert Spencer addresses HERE.
Spencer says:
To top it all off, CJN identified me in the original version of this story as a “white nationalist.” After I tweeted at them several times, emailed, and finally threatened legal action, they finally corrected the story, while repeating the original libel in their correction. This epitomizes the ideological bias, sloppiness, and irresponsibility of their coverage of this whole episode.
In B’nai Brith Canada’s press release “Canadian Muslim Voting Guide: Federal Election 2019,” Islamic antisemitism and an insidious attempt to influence Muslims (especially young Muslims) in Canada’s recent elections is exposed:
B’nai Brith Canada is deeply concerned after learning that a federal grant was used to produce a guide instructing Canadian Muslims on how to vote in last Monday’s national election.
The “Canadian Muslim Voting Guide: Federal Election 2019" was released by the Canadian Islamophobia Industry Research Project at Wilfred Laurier University on Oct. 18, just three days before Canadians went to the polls. Its front cover acknowledges support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), a federal agency that assigns research grants.
Disturbingly, one of the six “key issues” for Canadian Muslims unilaterally selected by the authors of the Voting Guide is support for the anti-Israel and antisemitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement (pages 18-20). The Voting Guide purports to assign a “Fail” grade to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for recognizing that BDS is a form of antisemitism that harms Jewish students on Canadian campuses, and gives the same failing grade to Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer.
Research by B’nai Brith shows that the Voting Guide’s lead author, Jasmine Zine, received $24,923 from the SSHRC in 2018 for a project called “Mapping the Canadian Islamophobia Industry.”
It is ill-advised to serve the causes of identity politics, Islamic supremacism, and political correctness. It makes one look cretinous and uninformed; even worse, it facilitates malignant agendas against free nations, and against human rights and freedoms for all.
“Controversial Islamic Conference In Toronto Draws Concerns,” by Michael Fraiman, Canadian Jewish News, December 24, 2019:
A recent Islamic conference in Toronto has drawn criticism from B’nai Brith over some of its guest speakers.
In a Dec. 19 press release, B’nai Brith Canada highlighted three speakers who have made anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist comments in the past: Yasir Qadhi, Siraj Wahhaj and Omar Suleiman.
“It is troubling that a major Canadian Muslim conference continues to invite extremist preachers to Canada,” Michael Mostyn, the CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said in the statement. “Surely there are enough qualified moderate Muslim leaders, without a history of extremist messaging, who can be chosen to speak at events such as these.”
The annual Islamic conference, called Reviving the Islamic Spirit, ran from Dec. 20-22, 2019. Started in 2001, it has grown to become one of the largest in North America, with more than 20,000 attendees each year. The conference organizers did not return The CJN’s request for comment.
Omar Suleiman, a Palestinian imam who works extensively in the humanitarian sector and with interfaith groups, has a history of making anti-Zionist social media posts, including writing on Facebook that “Zionists are the enemies of God,” and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
“My parents were displaced Palestinians due to the occupation and ended up meeting in Houston,” Suleiman wrote in an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News in May 2019, after a public backlash over his comments. “They were activists, and my late mother wrote poetry about the Palestinian catastrophe. But I was taught early on to not let championing the Palestinian cause descend into anti-Semitism in private or in public.”
Yasir Qadhi, a professor and author who was called “one of the most influential conservative clerics in American Islam” by The New York Times Magazine, is a vocal critic of Islamic extremism and was targeted with death threats by Islamic State propaganda in 2016. He was also part of a delegation of eight American imams and rabbis who visited Auschwitz in 2010 and signed a statement denouncing Holocaust denial as contrary to the ethics of Islam.
However, he has also made troubling comments about Jews. In the early 2000s, he repeated misinformation he read about Jews on a website he didn’t realize was anti-Semitic; he wrote a public apology in 2008 acknowledging and explaining his mistake. Earlier this year, he gave a talk about a hadith (a passage by the prophet Muhammad), that’s widely seen as anti-Semitic, since it calls for a battle at “the end of days,” in which Muslims will kill the Jews.
“The hadiths do mention killing (Jews). Let’s be honest here,” he says in the talk. “They do mention it. Let us realize, these hadiths are predictions, not prescriptions. Big difference.... These are not anti-Semitic hadiths whatsoever. It is merely describing a battle towards the end of times (between) the forces of good and the forces of evil.”
The third imam who concerned B’nai Brith is Siraj Wahhaj. He’s arguably the most controversial of the three. In 1993, Wahhaj was a character witness in the trial of the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, Omar Abdel-Rahman, in which he was loosely alleged to be, but unindicted as, a co-conspirator. Since then, he has frequently been the subject of far-right fake news stories, including one that falsely claimed he gave a keynote address at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.....