Imam Omar Suleiman has an anti-Semitic past. Has he changed on?

It was an respect for a immature though renouned Imam Omar Suleiman to be invited to broach a opening request for a event of a US House of Representatives. Suleiman is a owner and boss of a Texas-based Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, that proudly announced a arise and promoted it on a website and amicable media.

His brief and ardent request enclosed difference about love, unity, justice, assent and reconciliation, as good as a call to “be for truth, no matter who or for is opposite it.” [sic]

But his coming in Congress fast became politicized. Rep. Lee Zeldin tweeted that permitting Suleiman to give a opening request was “totally unacceptable.”

“Totally unsuitable that SpeakerPelosi had Omar Suleiman give a opening request yesterday in a House. He compares Israel to a Nazis calls them terrorists, supports Muslim Brotherhood, incites assault job for a Palestinian antifada a finish of zionism, etc. Bad call,” Zeldin tweeted.

Two years ago we wrote a square for The Algemeiner documenting Suleiman’s call for “the commencement of a finish of Zionism” and a 2014 Facebook post in that he pronounced that “Zionists are a enemies of God,” among other things. we had come opposite Suleiman usually given we was essay a post on Linda Sarsour’s antagonistic views on Israel.

During a march of my investigation, we beheld that a newly distinguished co-chair of a Women’s Mar and Suleiman were complimenting any other on Twitter. The articles Sarsour common about Suleiman embellished a intense picture: One described him as “a new kind of American imam” with “a extravagantly renouned social-media presence, with some-more than a million likes on his Facebook page and tens of millions of views for his YouTube sermons.”

Since my work focuses on anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism, we was mostly meddlesome in either Suleiman common Sarsour’s views on Israel. What we found was rather shocking, quite given that Suleiman’s immeasurable amicable media following allows him to widespread his views distant and wide.

Suleiman, in his 30s and creatively from New Orleans, rose to inflection due to his interfaith work and village organizing in a issue of Hurricane Katrina. He began study Islamic texts in 2000, and has taught Islamic studies during a university turn given 2008. He binds several modernized degrees and is in a routine of completing a doctorate from a International Islamic University of Malaysia in Islamic suspicion and civilization.

In 2014, Suleiman regularly called for a new intifada desirous by eremite passion during Ramadan and in invulnerability of a Al-Aqsa mosque. In another post, Suleiman accursed “Zionists” as “the enemies of God, His Messengers, frank supporters of all religions, and amiability as a whole.”

It was so frequency startling that Suleiman also compared “apartheid Israel” to a “Nazis,” claimed that Gaza was fast “a Holocaust,” denounced a “Israeli regime” as “terrorist,” and compared a Israeli army to a Taliban.

As we remarkable in my 2017 piece, Suleiman seemed to turn some-more calm in his open explanation on Israel after 2015.

But in a march of examination some of his eremite lectures, we satisfied that with courtesy to Jews, his theological views were maybe also rather problematic: In one harangue from 2012, he seemed to expel a Bani Israel (sons of Israel, or Jews) as a ultimate, offensive “Other” put on earth to offer as an instance of corrupted behavior. Even some-more shocking was another harangue he gave in 2016 on “Masjid Al-Aqsa: The assigned sanctuary.” Suleiman totally erased Jewish story and presented a Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, as legitimate Muslim inheritance from a commencement of time.

Sometime on or before Aug 2017, Suleiman apparently became wakeful that some of his views are polarizing. On Aug. 3 of that year, Suleiman posted a arrange of mea culpa on Facebook, concluding, “I ask my Lord and all of we to pardon me for anything I’ve ever said, written, or finished that harm you.”

“Slip ups are so many some-more dear nowadays. Social media is revengeful and hinders growth. Everything you’ve ever said…,” he posted.

On Aug. 8, he also combined a page to his website on anti-Semitism, writing, “I have never condoned anti-Semitism. we have worked with a Jewish village in colourful interfaith partnerships for over a decade.”

In a arise of this many new controversy, Suleiman wrote an essay in a Dallas Morning News in that he referenced his work with a Jewish village and past “regretful” argumentative posts. He claimed that “one thing I’ve never been is anti-Semitic.”

The article’s pretension sums adult Suleiman’s take: “Hateful attacks can't overpower voices of togetherness and love” – that is to say, Suleiman views his critics as enemy who, encouraged by hate, wish to overpower voices like his own, that foster togetherness and love.

It is transparent – and distinct – that Suleiman feels it is astray to concentration on some tweets and Facebook posts he common a few years ago while ignoring a work he is doing each day. It is also transparent that he unequivocally feels that his record does not aver accusations of anti-Semitism.

But it is equally transparent that he is reluctant to explain if and how his “regretful” views have changed.

In May 2018, Suleiman took to Facebook to sexually validate a Hamas-orchestrated riots during a Gaza border. The personality of Hamas had announced a goals of a riots really clearly when he vowed to “take down a limit and rip out their hearts [i.e. a hearts of Israelis] from their bodies.”

“This is Palestine. Apartheid Israel, with American appropriation and cover, continues to scare with impunity. Over 50…,” Suleiman posted in May 2018.

Given Suleiman’s prior calls for a third intifada and his demonization of Israel, he will maybe know that it sounds rather sinister when he announced that Palestinians “will continue to direct their freedom. And so will we. By any means necessary.”

Suleiman consistently frames a Palestinian dispute with Israel in eremite terms, portrayal it as one that should engage all Muslims, and adamantly denies a significance of a Land of Israel – as good as a centrality of Jerusalem and a Temple Mount – to Jews.

In his 2016 harangue on a Al-Aqsa mosque, Suleiman emphatically asserted that “Masjid [mosque] Al-Aqsa is that whole rectangle, that whole sanctuary, it is humongous, that is indeed all Masjid Al-Aqsa; a Dome of a Rock is during a core of it, so that whole devalue is Masjid Al-Aqsa,” erasing a fact that a same site is Judaism’s holiest, where chronological and archaeological justification uncover that a Second Temple stood until a drop in 70 C.E. The Dome of a Rock and a Al-Aqsa mosque weren’t built until over 500 years later, on a plateau tangible by a walls built to support a Temple complex.

Suleiman’s Al-Aqsa harangue is a joyless instance of a fundamentalist theological opinion on a basement of an Islamist perspective of history. He says that it was “proven that other religions usually flourished in Jerusalem underneath Muslim rule. It never happens any other way.” Complaining how astray it was to fear that Muslims could “turn Jerusalem into some arrange of blood bath,” Suleiman declared: “No, we commend a sanctification of that place, we adore that masjid, we adore that land, we know what that land is. No one wants to do anything with that land solely revive it to a approach that it was.”

The implications of Suleiman’s eremite training are clear: Muslims contingency essay to finish Jewish government and “restore” Jerusalem and a holy land “to a approach that it was” underneath Muslim rule.

It seems that Omar Suleiman’s theological views, that volume to a rejection of Jewish history, tone his domestic views. Like so many anti-Israel activists, Suleiman adamantly denies that anti-Zionism has anything to do with anti-Semitism. In a suggestion of a interfaith activism he seems to validate so warmly, he could maybe deliberate some of a applicable element published by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who explains that “Anti-Zionism, denying Jews a right to their one and usually common home by misrepresenting Judaism, is a new anti-Semitism, each bit as destructive and dangerous as a old.”

That would assistance Suleiman know that we can't erase Jewish story and credibly explain that we conflict anti-Semitism.

We can't usually malign Jewish fundamentalists who dream of demolishing a Muslim shrines on a Temple Mount in sequence to build a third Temple as dangerous extremists. Muslim fundamentalists who evangelise that a Temple Mount has been Al-Aqsa from a commencement of time and explain that a whole site is a mosque are no better.