All over the West, politicians have no idea who they’re dealing with.

“GOP Governor Embraces Radical Muslim Cleric Who Somehow Makes Westboro Baptist Look Acceptable,” by Ilya Feoktistov, The Federalist, February 13, 2019:

“When God talks about the types of relationships that a person is allowed to have,” thundered the American preacher from his pulpit last year, “and he says that it is the marriage between a man and the woman in holy matrimony, in accordance with the Bible, then that is the truth…God makes it very clear – there is only one path: his path.”

On February 1, 2019, the Republican governor of this preacher’s state visited his house of worship and embraced the popular clergyman, telling the hundreds of gathered congregants: “He asked me to come visit with you, and I said I would be honored and pleased to do that.”

“Obama is the son of adultery…Sort of common, unfortunately in our country,” is the type of political commentary one might hear from the pulpit at this preacher’s house of worship on any given day. But this did not happen in Trump country. The Republican governor, who told the preacher that his sermons are filled with “such beauty and such power about faith and love and community,” is Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. He says he fully supports gay marriage and transgender issues.

When It’s Okay to Be Anti-Gay

As the reader might have guessed by now, there is only one kind of preacher who can hold such views about traditional marriage between a man and a woman and still be acclaimed by the left-wing Massachusetts establishment. The preacher is Imam Yasir Fahmy of the ill-famed Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC). I replaced “Allah” with “God” and “Quran” with “Bible” in the quote above.

“Behind fornication,” yelled Fahmy into the ISBCC’s mic during Friday prayers on February 9, 2018. “Behind the, the willingness or the allowance to allow my sexual exploits to be unrestricted, that I — that I please myself sexually in any way that I want, in any, you know, manifestation of that — behind all of that is a very big injustice.”

According to Fahmy, sexual liberty is one of the “three pillars of evil that corrode the very essence of society.” “Don’t indulge in those vices,” he told the 1,500 or so Bostonians who come every Friday to hear him preach, before comparing those who have sex outside of a traditional marriage to people who engage in “stealing, cheating, killing, murdering, pillaging, raping,” with all being “rooted in us indulging our base desires.”

Baker, it is clear, would never embrace a Christian fundamentalist who preached that way, though he would be hard pressed to find one so intolerant outside of the Westboro Baptist Church.

Anti-Semitism on Blast? Why Not!

Indeed, Baker’s new imam friend also frequently whips up Jew-hatred at the ISBCC. For instance, in the summer of 2017, after three Muslim men snuck out of the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex occupying the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and murdered two Israeli police officers, Israel was forced to close the mosque for Friday prayers as police searched for additional weapons and crime evidence inside. Deadly riots ensued as anti-Semitic imams in the Palestinian territories and the world over took advantage of the crisis to dust off their sermons about how the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque was in danger from the unholy Jews.

According to the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL’s) report on the 2017 Temple Mount crisis: “Widespread conspiracy theories about nefarious efforts by Jews plotting to remove Muslims from the site continue to reverberate throughout Arab and Muslim world.” Fahmy decided to invoke this “Al-Aqsa libel” conspiracy theory in his July 21, 2017 sermon, which he called “Every Muslim Should Care About Masjid [Mosque] al-Aqsa.”

“Brothers and sisters,” began Imam Fahmy (some redundant Arabic not quoted):

many of us have been watching the news in the past week, observing what is happening in al-Masjid al-Aqṣā…That for the first time in so many years, for the Friday prayer that we’re praying right now not happen, for the Masjid al-Aqṣā to be closed down, is abomination to Islām and Muslimīn…So when the believer sees what is happening to those sacred spaces that, the boots of soldiers are crawling or walking on those spaces, it breaks the soul of the believer…The greatest of oppressors and wrongdoers are [those] who prevent the house of Allāh, to have Allāh’s name remembered there.

Half a year later, when President Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Fahmy was at it again, saying that recognizing thousands of years of Jewish religious and political history in Jerusalem is just a “senseless proclamation that mean[s] nothing.” He warned that the entire world will have to answer to God if “we collectively as human beings, don’t wake up to the desecration that is happening in those lands.” Then he repeated the lies, half-lies, and fabrications that have stoked Jew-hatred among historically-moderate Muslims everywhere:

Brothers and sisters, when we think about Palestine, when we think about the Holy Land, we have to think about Allāh…[The Palestinians] are being restricted by air, land, and sea to not have access to their homes…To not have electricity except for an hour or two a day. To have contaminated water because of sewage. Children who are starving in lands — over a million children who are food-deprived…There is no good Christian, there is no good Jew, there is no good Muslim who will see the type of oppression and injustice that is happening in that land and say, ‘The prophets would be okay with that.’…That means we can’t be silent, we can’t be apathetic because if we are, then we are silent Satans.

In all of the Fahmy sermons attacking Israel, there is one word that the imam never uses: “Israel.” He religiously avoids naming the country, following the fashion of those in the Muslim world who want to see it destroyed.

Prior to coming to the ISBCC, Fahmy studied as a scholar in residence at the Islamic Center of Passaic County in New Jersey under imam and convicted Hamas member Mohammad Qatanani….