A radical Islamist imam in the Malmö no-go zone of Rosengård has claimed that Muslims carrying Swedish flags are “heretics” as the flag contains a Christian cross.
Imam Basem Mahmoud, also known as Abu Hamza, has a history of allegedly preaching hatred against Jews and others he deems “infidels”, with Swedish media having reported on his hate-filled sermons six months ago.
Despite the imam being reported to the police for incitement to racial hatred, he continues to preach hateful sermons weekly at the al-Sahaba Mosque in Rosengård, Swedish newspaper Expressen reports.
According to the newspaper, the imam became angry seeing high schools students waving Swedish flags and said in a sermon: “Those who carry crosses should not be offered prayer because it is our belief that these people are perfect heretics.”
“If someone wears a cross on their clothes without being aware of it, we order him to take it off. Whenever the prophet saw a cross in a cloth or on someone’s clothes or whatever, he destroyed it,” he added.
Earlier this month, Mahmoud is said to have called for Muslims to kill Jews, Expressen reporting he quoted an Islamic Hadith saying: “Judgment day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, but the stones and trees will say: ‘Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him.'”
Malmö has become a hotbed of antisemitic behaviours in Sweden in recent years, and members of the local Jewish community have criticised the situation.
A report on antisemitism in schools in the multicultural city released earlier this year claimed that much of the anti-Jewish hatred comes from pupils of Arab and Middle Eastern backgrounds.
“It was Arabic students who had a passion for Hitler and I just assume and conclude that it comes from antisemitism. They had well recently learned about the Holocaust and got to the fact that Hitler was on their side in some way and that he was good in some way because he had killed so many Jews,” a Swedish school official said.