Danish Imam Praised Mohammed’s ‘War Against the Jews’ on Day Before Copenhagen Attack

The Times of Israel reports on a fiery sermon delivered by Danish imam Hajj Saeed at the Al-Faruq Mosque in Copenhagen, just a day before Islamist Omar El-Hussein launched deadly attacks against a free speech conference and a synagogue.

In the sermon, the imam compared interfaith discussions with the wars Mohammed began against those who did not believe in his deity:

Did he call for closer relations, harmony, and dialogue with them, in the manner of the UN and of those who call to reconciliation Truth and Falsehood? Or did he call upon them to worship Allah? When they violated their pledge and did not accept this call – well, you know what he did to them… He waged war against the Jews.

Saeed also accused the UN of existing to “fight Islam” and called for what the Times of Israel calls “ideological conflict” to combat Western “bogus culture, which has hurled them into the abyss of depravity and corruption, and which has reduced them from humanity to the level of beasts.”

As the Times of Israel takes care to note, there is no evidence El-Hussein attended this sermon or saw the video posted online by Hizb ut-Tahrir, “a pan-Islamic political organization active in some 40 countries in the world,” including Denmark.  The sermon is, however, further evidence that proclaiming an absolute barrier of separation between Islam and Islamism is absurd.  As MEMRI devotes itself to chronicling, the type of sermon Saeed delivered — with its paranoid themes of a world conspiring to destroy Islam and confuse the faithful, exhortations for Muslims to do battle with corrupt non-Muslim culture, and praise for war against the Jews — is not as rare as we might hope.