Imam Mundhir Abdallah is a good example of the dilemmas that have confronted politicians in Denmark in their response to Islamist extremism among the country’s 300,000 Muslims, the large majority of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants.
In May 2017, the Danish Jewish community filed a complaint against Imam Abdallah for a sermon he delivered two months previously, in which he implored faithful Muslims to kill the Jews on “Judgement Day” and urged the “liberation” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem from “the filth of the Zionists.”
The Danish authorities were aware of Imam Abdallah’s extremist beliefs and associations for at least two years before that. In February 2015, a man named Omar al-Hussein attended Abdallah’s mosque in the Copenhagen suburb of Nørrebro; two days later, al-Hussein embarked on an armed terror rampage in the Danish capital, gunning down a Jewish security volunteer, Dan Uzan, at Copenhagen’s main synagogue before being shot himself by police. So when audio of Abdallah’s Jew-baiting sermon of 2017 surfaced on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the reaction against him was forceful—and not solely from the Jewish community. [JNS] Read more
