Imam Ammar Shahin of the Islamic Center of Davis in California delivered a sermon on Friday in which he quoted an antisemitic hadith and prayed for Allah to “annihilate” Jews “down to the very last one.”
The video of Shahin’s sermon was posted to the Islamic Center of Davis’s YouTube channel on Friday (Update: the video has since been removed), and translated and excerpted by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), though portions of the sermon were delivered in English.
The topic of the sermon was the ongoing controversy at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where the Israeli government installed metal detectors at access points to the Al-Aqsa Mosque after a terrorist shot and killed two Druze Israeli soldiers earlier this month.
Jewish visitors to the nearby Western Wall have had to pass through metal detectors for decades, due to the security threat of terrorism. Nevertheless, the new metal detectors for Muslim worshippers have been whipped into a source of outrage among Palestinians and throughout the Muslim world.
In his sermon at the Islamic Center, Shahin quoted, in Arabic, one of the most notorious antisemitic hadiths (teachings of Muhammad) — one quoted by the Hamas charter — in which Muslims are called upon to kill the Jews to bring about Judgment Day, and in which Muhammad is said to prophesy that the Jews will try to hide behind rocks and trees, which will call out to Muslims to kill them. READ MORE
