The fallout continues over Democrats inviting controversial Southern Methodist University adjunct professor and imam Omar Suleiman to deliver the opening prayer to the U.S. House of Representatives. Critics sounded the alarm over Suleiman’s history of anti-Israel, Islamist commentary, while Suleiman and his defenders dismissed accusations of anti-Semitism and called the other side “Islamophobic.”
Now German-Israeli researcher Petra Marquardt-Bigman, whose 2017 article documenting Suleiman’s anti-Zionist statements has been much cited, reexamines the “polarizing” imam, including his strenuous denial of anti-Semitism. Among a mountain of evidence to the contrary, Marquardt-Bigman cites a 2016 lecture in which he “presented the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, as rightful Muslim patrimony from the beginning of time.” As she concludes, “you cannot erase Jewish history and credibly claim that you oppose anti-Semitism.”
