A New York City Muslim cleric told his congregants in a sermon they must not befriend or engage in any alliances with Christians and Jews.
The exhortation by Abul Baraa Muhammad Abdullah Amreeki was based directly on verses from the Quran, pointed out Jihad Watch Director Robert Spencer in a post Wednesday.
The imam cited Quran 5:51 in a sermon posted to YouTube on Jan. 25, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI.
“O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies,” the verse reads, according to an English interpretation of the original Arabic. “They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you – then indeed, he is of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.”
Spencer commented that it’s “one of the many verses that Islamic apologists in the US claim has no practical application today, but applies only to very particular circumstances in the seventh century.”
“Imam Abul Baraa Muhammad Abdullah Amreeki doesn’t seem to have received that memo,” Spencer wrote.
The imam, who converted to Islam in a New York prison, said it’s common today for Muslims to spy on, covertly monitor and “entrap” other Muslims because the government or police threatened them or offered some incentive.
“Taking the disbelievers as friends, meaning giving them support and assistance against fighting Muslims. … This is an act of disbelief in Islam,” he declared.
The Muslim cleric said it’s a known fact that the FBI and police have spies in every mosque in New York City and some other U.S. cities who are paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory statements.
Amreeki said Muslims who take the bait will receive a worse punishment than infidels on Judgement Day.
“They want to be comfortable in America they want to be comfortable living with the infidels, so they do these things,” he said of such Muslims.
The sermon was delivered at the Rockaway Islamic Center in Queens, New York, where Amreeki is the imam. The video was uploaded to the center’s Facebook page and to Amreeki’s YouTube channel on Jan. 25.
Amreeki was born and raised Christian in Jamaica, Queens. At the age of 19, he was imprisoned for robbery and spent time at Rikers Island.
A bio on the website Islam’s Finest says Amreeki is an Arabic-to-English translator who studied at the Qortoba Institute for Arabic Studies in Cairo. He also attended CUNY Medgar Evers College. He previously the imam of Islamic Center of South Carolina in Conway, South Carolina.
