Liberals were recently out in force in Pittsburgh, their ignorance on full display, as they blamed President Donald Trump for the millennia old Jew hatred that had found another acolyte in Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 praying Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Jew hatred exists on the right, the left and is the raison d’etre of Islamists, but out of the three, Jewish liberals only protest right wing Jew hatred. They usually have nothing to say about Muslim Jew hatred, even though it is being carefully cultivated and stoked in mosques across the US. Islamic Jew-hatred is a time bomb waiting to go off, but that does not seem to bother liberal American Jews very much.

When in July and December 2017, imams in mosques in North Carolina, New Jersey, Texas and California, respectively, called for the killing of Jews, American organizations were conspicuously quiet. No one was holding protests, calling on President Donald Trump to “devise a plan” to confront Muslim supremacy, as the ADL had done in response to the white supremacists after Charlottesville.

This is disturbing, because terrorism is frequently preceded by indoctrination. While freedom of speech, even hate speech, is protected under the US First Amendment, direct calls for violence and murder of any single person or people, are not. Calls in US mosques for the murder of Jews need to be taken seriously. They need to be prosecuted, not tolerated.

It is therefore unsurprising that no one, let alone American Jews, has paid attention to an October sermon by imam Hasan Sabri at the Islamic Center of South Florida in Pompano Beach on October 12. In that sermon, Sabri said, “Palestine Must Be Liberated ‘Even If This Leads To The Martyrdom Of Tens Of Millions Of Muslims‘, according to a recent report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “But what is the position of a believing Muslim about the Palestinian cause? “asked Sabri rhetorically, “That Palestine in its entirety is Islamic land, and there is no difference between what was occupied in 1948 and 1967. There is no difference between this village or that village, this city or that city. All of it is Islamic waqf land that was occupied by force. The responsibility for it lies with the entire Islamic nation, and the [Palestinians] should benefit from this land. If a land is occupied or plundered, it should be liberated from the occupiers and plunderers…”

In previous sermons documented by MEMRI, Sabri spoke of atheists as “a worm in the body of Muslims, a germ that is causing disease and weakness to his nation” (March 2018) and “Palestine, Al-Aqsa, and Jerusalem have one path and one way to be liberated, and that is the way of Saladin, and the way of Omar ibn Al-Khatt…” (April 2018).

Despite this display of seething hatred, you will never find a liberal protesting in front of the Islamic Center of South Florida. On the contrary, in September 2017, imam Sabri was a panelist at “Interfaith and Race Relations Peace and Acceptance Conference” at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth, Florida. The invitation described the event as “promoting peace and acceptance for building a just community”.

The Pittsburgh attack, as horrific as it was, unfortunately also appears to have hardened the beliefs of liberal Jews that the main threat to Jews in the US comes from the far right. However, American Jews ignore the Islamic Jew hatred being preached and nurtured in Islamic centers and mosques at their peril. In Europe, such preaching has had murderous results. In Copenhagen, for example, a Muslim listened to a sermon similar to the ones issued by the American imams, then murdered a Jewish guard in front of the city’s synagogue.

Calls from imams in mosques to murder anyone should set off alarm bells that murders are in the works. Or does it matter for liberal American Jews only when the potential perpetrator is a neo Nazi?

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Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst and a fellow with the Gatestone Institute.

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