Hassan El-Alami’s statements ought to fill every American with horror.
“El-Amani’s prayer is a disgrace,” said Gerald McDermott, an Anglican priest, theologian, author, and retired academic specializing in Christian-Jewish relations. “He’s calling on God to kill Zionists in front of audiences of men who are instructed on a regular basis that they are supposed to be instruments for God’s purposes. This is incitement, pure and simple.”
In the April 17 sermon, delivered in English, he said the Jews inside Medina betrayed Muhammad and applied the episode to Gaza before leading the prayer. Dozens of worshippers can be seen in the YouTube videos of El-Alami’s sermons. On some days, he speaks to a packed hall; other times, attendance is relatively sparse. In the footage reviewed, no attendee in view of the camera expresses any objection to his calls for God to kill Zionists.
“El-Alami’s antisemitic invective is the same discourse that has long poisoned Europe,” warns Jules Gomes, an Anglican priest currently working as a journalist in Rome. “Preachers in European mosques deliberately use ‘Zionist’ as a euphemism for ‘Jew’—a substitution confirmed by their constant recourse to Qur’anic proof texts about Jews, not Zionists.”
Gomes, who has written extensively for Focus on Western Islamism, adds that “Europe has long been ground zero for such rhetoric. Americans ignore our experience at their peril.”
Public Funds and Connections
The Al-Huda Society has received taxpayer dollars in the form of two Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans related to the COVID-19 pandemic totaling $76,975, both of which were forgiven. In April 2020, the society also received an $8,000 Small Business Administration disaster-relief grant that did not have to be repaid.
Moreover, officers from the Chelsea Police Department attended a community dinner at the mosque on October 9, 2026. One week later, El-Alami ended his Friday sermon with the imprecatory prayer in Arabic quoted above. The dinner was organized under the auspices of “Faith & Blue,” a national initiative that began in 2020 to promote stronger ties between local police departments and local faith communities. The Chelsea Police Department met with numerous churches—and one synagogue—as part of its 2026 campaign.
According to a post on the City of Chelsea’s Facebook page, City Manager Fidel Maltez joined community members at an Iftar gathering at the mosque in March 2026. Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) has contacted the city manager’s office, Chelsea Police Chief Keith Houghton, members of Chelsea’s City Council, and leaders of the mosque itself—including El-Alami—and asked for comment on El-Alami’s statements, but has received no response.
Local Christians who participate in interfaith dialogue need to confront this rhetoric, said Aaron Fruh, a retired Assemblies of God pastor who now serves as the executive director of the Redwood Coalition, an organization that works to educate Americans about the threat of antisemitism.
“It is time for many in the Christian clergy and academy to rethink their naive practice of being Islamic apologists,” Fruh said, adding that the rhetoric broadcast at Al-Huda is not an anomaly. “This antisemitic and anti-Western language is central to Islam’s mandate to destroy Israel and the Judeo-Christian values of the Western world. The barbarians are at the gate and if they ever gain the power they lust, the first to be slaughtered will be the useful idiots who let them in.”
Who Is El-Alami?
El-Alami, who is listed as on the society’s website, is also listed as chairman of the board of the Boston Islamic Seminary in the school’s 2024 tax documents. The dual role is not surprising, given that the seminary operates out of Al-Huda’s building in Chelsea. Facebook posts from both El-Alami and the mosque’s accounts indicate that his ties to the mosque date back to 2011 and 2012. An annual report published by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) for 2017 and 2018 indicates that El-Alami served on the board of directors of the Boston Chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS), which, according to testimony by Abdurahman Alamoudi as reported by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, was founded as an “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He also served on the ISB’s “board of trust.” The ISB’s “inaugural trustees … included Yusuf Al Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who was praised by Bin Laden, and Abdulrahman Alamoudi, an Al Qaeda fundraiser who was jailed in 2004 for conspiring with the Libyan regime to assassinate a Saudi Crown Prince,” as Sam Westrop wrote in 2017. Alamoudi pleaded guilty in 2004 to federal charges of unlicensed dealings with Libya, false statements and tax violations, and was sentenced to 23 years in prison; the Justice Department said court documents showed he had helped finance a plot to assassinate then–Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.
Health Care Provider?
El-Alami’s Facebook profile makes no reference to MAS or ISB but does state that he worked at South Shore Hospital. A 2024 article on the hospital system’s website refers to El-Alami’s work as a “blood bank supervisor” at the facility.
El-Alami, whose Facebook connections include Islamist radical Abdullah Faruuq, has received numerous accolades for his fundraising efforts while participating in the Pan-Mass Challenge, an annual bike-a-thon across Massachusetts that raises funds for cancer research and treatment at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
In his October 16, 2026, sermon at the Al-Huda Society, El-Alami can be seen wearing a jacket embroidered with the PMC’s slogan “Run. Ride. Give.” The embroidery also mentions South Shore Health, a non-profit that owns and operates a community hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Efforts to elicit a response from South Shore Health to determine El-Alami’s current ties to the organization have proven fruitless.
“Hassan El-Alami’s statements ought to fill every American with horror,” declares Dyanne Martin, Associate Professor of English and Core Studies at Wheaton College and Senior Research Fellow for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP. Sadly, many young people agree with El-Alami, Martin reports.”My Christian college students regularly tell me that approximately 80% of their peers have adopted antisemitic attitudes, with many students openly mocking Jews and ridiculing Zionists. These incidents are anecdotal, but my classroom experiences mirror those anecdotes.”
Martin wonders if young people in the U.S. will recognize El-Alami’s incitement for what it is.
“Students seem to believe that no Muslim, including radical terrorist Muslims, can do any wrong—and that no Jew or Zionist can do right,” she said. “Such blatant calls for violence like these from El-Alami have no place in America. We must not tolerate those with ancient hatreds who whip up bloodlust in others to bring jihad to our streets.”
Officials from the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston did not respond to requests for comment.
(Note: Al-Huda’s main YouTube page, which previously listed all the videos linked above, no longer displays the videos in question. In fact, it appears that the Al-Huda Society has hidden all of its recent videos from its main page. The most recent videos displayed on its main page are from four years ago. This change was made after FWI contacted the mosque about the videos in question. For now, the videos cited in this article can be viewed via the links.)
