YouTube is being accused of protecting hate speech after the social media company removed a video that exposed a Muslim imam’s advocacy for the stoning deaths of gays.
The Middle East Media Research Institute spotlighted the video of Canadian imam Zafar Bangash lashing out at the West for being “proud of being homosexuals.”
“It is time for us to pick up the stones to stone these people to death for [the] abomination,” he preached. “Allah imposes [this duty] upon us.”
The video, posted on another platform, is here:
[iframe src=”https://www.memri.org/player/clip/42088/1/1″ width=”600″ height=”440″ frameborder=”0″]
The recording was made at an April 1996 conference at an unknown location, MEMRI reported.
At the time, Bangash “praised Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie as the first direct challenge to the West’s political hegemony, because, according to him, the publishing of The Satanic Verses was a carefully calculated attack against Islam that Muslims should not tolerate.”
“He said that Muslims cannot coexist with the West because they violate all of Allah’s commandments,” MEMRI reported. “He gave the example of Western girls, who he said commit adultery and fornication at the age of 10 and 12 right in front of their brothers and fathers.”
He declared “there is something wrong with Muslims who treat the Jews as friends, and he assured the audience that the Jews, Christians, polytheists, and infidels will ‘spare no effort’ to ruin Muslims because of the hatred that they harbor against them.”
MEMRI said the imam “is still active today and preaches at the Islamic Society of York Region in Ontario. He is the director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT) and is on the editorial board of Toronto-based Crescent International alongside U.S.-based Imam Muhammad Al-Asi.”
The imam said there is “a confusion in the minds of some Muslims who think that today’s Christians are the People of the Book, the Christians and Jews and so on, and therefore they are our cousins and so forth.”
“First of all, I would like to ask those of my brothers and sisters who think that way whether the original book that was revealed to either Moses or Jesus – does anybody have a copy of that book? The original book, not the distorted version that they keep on changing every so many years.”
He said that if “you do not have a copy of the original book, then these people cannot be considered People of the Book, because there is no Book that we are talking about to which they belong.”
“Everywhere, whether you go to America, or you go to Europe, or you go the Israel, or you go to other parts of the world, they commit this abomination and they feel proud of it. My brothers and sisters, it is not time to live in coexistence with them. It is time for us to pick up the stones to stone these people to death for the abomination that they are committing,” he said.
“But you know, we as Muslims must know that this can be expected from these people. We shouldn’t have any illusion about it. The reason being that Allah has told us in the Quran that these Jews murdered even the prophets of Allah. Did they not kill the Prophet Zachariah, and John [the Baptist]? The Jews killed them, so why should we expect them to treat us any better? I think that we will be remiss if we think that these people are going to be our friends. We must not be under any illusions that people that cannot be friends of Allah and His prophets can be friends of the Muslims, because if they are going to be our [friends], then we must examine our own faith – then there is something wrong with us, because Allah tells us that you cannot expect any friendship from these people.”
