A Malmö imam has been charged with incitement to racial hatred by Swedish prosecutors after antisemitic sermons in which he claimed Jews run the west and the Muslims who collude with Jews are “traitors.”
Imam Basem Mahmoud is accused of spreading hateful rhetoric from his sermons in a basement mosque in the notorious no-go area of Rosengård for at least two years before being charged with spreading hate and is expected to face trial in September.
Religious studies researcher Simon Sorgenfrei was brought in by prosecutor Magdalena Tesfai to examine the rhetoric of the imam and stated the sermons allude to passages of the Qur’an but also tie into a “broader anti-Semitic conspiracy narrative that suggests there is a plot, in this case against Muslims, between ‘Jews’ and the ‘West’,” Expressen reports.
Last year, Mahmoud claimed that Muslims carrying Swedish flags were “heretics” as the flag contains a Christian cross, stating, “Those who carry crosses should not be offered prayer because it is our belief that these people are perfect heretics.”
Mahmoud has also been forced to give up his basement mosque as the property management company MKB refused to extend his lease on the property.
The company’s chairman Lars-Erik Lövden commented on Mahmoud saying, “This type of behaviour is unacceptable and in Malmö, there is no place whatsoever for this type of incitement against individual groups regardless of which group it is about and where it comes from.”
He added that the refusal to extend the lease was not based on the hate crime charges but added, “But I was extremely upset that he used the premises for the purpose of spreading extreme messages.”
Mahmoud is not the first radical imam to find himself prosecuted by Swedish authorities in recent years. In 2019, several radical imams were detained by the Swedish security police, including Riyad Al-Duhan, also known as Abo Raad.
Abo Raad, known for his connections to the radical ideology of Salafism, was set to be deported after a request from the security police but the deportation did not take place. Instead, Raad announced he would be leaving Sweden on his own accord earlier this year.
“It is my opinion that the process that I was subjected to in 2019 and that led to the decision to classify me as a security risk and deprive me of my freedom and my rights in Sweden in all its parts has been and is undemocratic,” Raad stated.
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