As Quebec’s Muslim community grapples with the rejection of its request to build a Muslim cemetery in a small town southwest of Quebec City, Montreal police have confirmed they issued an arrest warrant last week for an imam who allegedly made hateful comments about Jews.
The imam, Sheikh Muhammad bin Musa Al-Nasr, a Jordanian national, was invited to Dar Al-Arqam mosque in Montreal to give a sermon last December.
A video of the sermon, published on YouTube, shows the imam reciting the Arabic words, “O Muslim, O servant to Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
B’nai Brith in Quebec is urging Canada’s federal government to locate the imam and extradite him to Canada.
The mosque where the imam delivered the sermon is not a member of the Muslim Council of Montreal, according the Council’s president.
Meanwhile, members of Quebec City’s Muslim community are reacting with a mixture of sadness, disbelief and outrage after 35 residents of the town of Saint-Appollinaire, 35 kilometres southwest of the Quebec capital, voted 19-16 Sunday against a proposed Muslim cemetery in the town. (Only those living adjacent to the land were eligible to vote.)
The president of the Quebec City mosque where six people were killed in a shooting rampage in January, says the vote shocked his community.
Following the January attack, Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume promised to help his city’s Muslim community build a cemetery of their own.
Quebec Muslims currently bury people in a cemetery in a Montreal suburb, about 270 kilometres south of Quebec City.
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