10 May 2006
A Montreal mosque will be hosting tomorrow a lecture by American Sheikh Abu Ammar Yasir Qadhi, a preacher who, in at least one of his exegeses, combines traditional Islamic anti-Jewish motives with Western anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Qadhi, who holds an M.A. in Islamic Theology (Aqeedah) from the College of Dawah at the Islamic University of Madinah, is currently an instructor at the Al-Maghrib Institute, an Islamic studies institution present in both the US and Canada.
In his 2001 Tafsir (exegesis) of Surah Yusuf (Joseph Surah) Qadhi embarks on a history of the Jews and how, according to Islamic theology, Jews incurred God’s wrath and lost any claim to the Land of Israel. However, Islamic theology appears to be insufficient to make his case. Qadhi also resorts to anti-Semitic mythology - the “Khazar canard”, to be precise - claiming the majority of European Jews are not descended from the Bani Israil (Children of Israel), but from a Turkic tribe whose leaders converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages (1). This myth has been used by Christian-identity cultists, as well as Muslim propagandists to disqualify any link between the majority of modern-day Jews and the Land of Israel (2).
Having done just that, Qadhi alleges that Sephardic Jews add a letter in brackets to their names attesting their ‘purity of race’, as opposed to the Ashkenazi they consider to be “impure filthy Jews”. Turning his attention away from these ‘anthropological’ considerations, Qadhi addresses the Holocaust:
[...] All of these Polish Jews which Hitler was supposedly trying to exterminate, that’s another point, by the way, Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews. There are a number of books out on this written by Christians, you should read them. The Hoax of the Holocaust (3), I advise you to read this book and write this down, the Hoax of the Holocaust, a very good book. All of this is false propaganda and I know it sounds so far-fetched, but read it. The evidences [sic] are very strong. And they’re talking about newspaper articles, clippings, everything and look up yourself what Hitler really wanted to do. We’re not defending Hitler, by the way, but the Jews, the way that they portray him, also is not correct.
Yasir Qadhi then concludes his lecture alleging in terms which echo the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Jews study Islam in order to sow division among Muslims and destroy them:
You can use this against them (Jews) so easily [...] You go to America, you find that 95% of the Islamic Studies professors are Jews, you know that? 95% of Islamic Studies [sic] are Jews. And 0% of Judaic Studies [sic] are Muslims. I am not advising any Muslim to waste his time studying Judaism but I’m saying, why are Jews studying Islam? There is a reason, not that they want to help us, they want to destroy us [...] they want to bring about doubts, look at the doubts that exist, look at the divisions, the discord, look at the disunity, look at all these ideologies that are being spread (4). Know that the Yahood [Jews] and the Kuffar [Infidels] like this type of thing.
Yasir Qadhi’s lecture is presented by the Assunah Al Nabawiah Mosque and Qabeelat Asad, the Montreal student body of the Al-Maghrib Institute. The lecture’s topic is The Mahdi [Prophesied redeemer of Islam]: Between Fact and Fiction
(1) This myth draws on a pseudo-scientific book by Arthur Koestler titled The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage (1976). The fact Koestler himself was a Jew made his wild speculations all the more attractive for anti-Semites of all stripes.
(2) For a critical discussion on the “Khazar canard”, see Contemporary Racist and Judeophobic Ideology Discovers the Khazars, or, Who Really Are the Jews? by Robert Singerman
(3) Yasir Qadhi is most probably referring to The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (1976) by Arthur R. Butz. The book claims the Holocaust is a lie deliberately contrived to justify the creation of the State of Israel. In December 2005, Butz, an electric engineering professor at Northwestern University (Illinois), congratulated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his statements denying the Holocaust.
(4) Compare Qadhi’s charge that Jews spread ideologies to undermine Islam with Protocol 2.3 which charges Jews likewise seek to undermine the established order: “Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism. To us Jews, at any rate, it should be plain to see what a disintegrating importance these directives have had upon the minds of the Goyim”.