A director and trustee of Islamic Relief, Britain’s biggest Muslim charity, shared posts praising Hamas and branding Jews “the grandchildren of monkeys and pigs”, a report has claimed.
Egypt-born Heshmat Khalifa, who also chairman of Islamic Relief Australia and a director for the Muslim charities German and South African branches, shared the incendiary Arabic-language posts on Facebook in 2014 and 2015, according to an investigation by The Times — apparently prompted by the overthrow of his homeland’s Islamist Muslim Brotherhood government by General Sisi.
A seemingly incensed Khalifa denounced Sisi as a “pimp son of the Jews”, “Zionist pig”, “Zionist traitor”, and “Zionist criminal”, and Jews themselves as “the grandchildren of monkeys and pigs”.
He also described Hamas as “the purest resistance movement in modern history and a symbol of honour, resistance and the real Islam” and said that proscribing its armed wing as a terrorist organisation was a “shameful disgrace to all Muslims”.
Khalifa has now had to resign from his positions, with Islamic Relief insisting it does not endorse the sentiments he expressed.
“Following the publication of Heshmat Khalifa’s social media posts in [the] media, Islamic Relief reiterates its strong condemnation of the offensive views expressed within them,” the charity said in an official blog post responding to the scandal.
“These have no place in our organisation. We are appalled by the hateful comments he made and unreservedly condemn all forms of discrimination, including anti-Semitism,” the statement continued.
“We are fully committed to reviewing our processes for screening trustees and senior executives’ social media posts to ensure that this will not happen again,” it concluded.
However, The Times noted that, while praised by the likes of David Miliband while he was a Labour government minister, and funded by the British government via its foreign aid budget and the likes of the European Commission and the United Nations, Islamic Relief has “For many years… been forced to deny claims of ideological ties with Islamist organisations,” as well as allegations “that its funds were sometimes passed to questionable recipients.”
Indeed, the charity was banned in the United Arab Emirates, which includes the Abu Dhabi and Dubai, for alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood in 2014 — “the same year [that] Israel claimed Islamic Relief was using donations to support Hamas, the militant Palestinian organisation, and banned it from working in the West Bank,” according to The Times.