“She [Aisha, Muhmmad’s youngest wife] called them brothers of apes and pigs—she didn’t call them the sons.”

—Imam Omar Suleiman on the “appropriate” contemporary use of the Koranic epithet “apes and pigs”

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Controversy has erupted over Imam Omar Suleiman having been granted the privilege of giving an invocational prayer to the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, May 9, 2019. The good Imam’s invitation was rather ordinary:

 

“Suleiman’s congresswoman, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, invited him to deliver the prayer through a standard form on the webpage of the Office of the Chaplain of the House, according to a congressional official.”

 

Despite this anodyne process, New York Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin, in particular, raised concerns that as documented elsewhere, Suleiman “accused Israel of being terrorists, posted in support of [the traditionalist Muslim, pro-jihad] Muslim Brotherhood, called for [a] Palestinian Intifada, and more.”

 

Suleiman’s Islamic advocacy group and Leftist supporters have counterattackedspraying charges of “Islamophobia”, while the Imam himself tweeted,

“It is clearly part of an attempt to erase Muslim leaders from public life and also to keep deflecting from the real Antisemitism of the right”

Omar Suleiman’s tweet underscores two profound ironies ignored amidst this overblown partisan maelstrom. First, Suleiman’s own virulent canonical Islamic Jew-hatred was elaborated in copious, ugly detail during a 5-part, nearly 6-hour 2012 lecture series, “Lost Chronicles of Beni Israel,” still available online (as of 5/13/2019). Second, consistent with the complete denial by “conservative” politicians, media elites, religious figures, and academics of the Islam animating the global pandemic of Muslim Jew-hatred, even Rep. Zeldin, Suleiman’s most strident accuser, dared not broach this taboo subject.

 

Relying upon Islam’s quintessential defining sources—the Koran itself, and the traditions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad or “hadith”—Omar Suleiman analyzes the so-called “Beni Israel,” Jews, as depicted in these canonical texts. The crux of Suleiman’s analyses comport with classical and modern authoritative Islamic teachings on the ancient-cum-contemporary indelible characteristics of the vast majority of Jews. Suleiman lays out the thesis he develops in two queries, and a statement, from the opening lecture:

 

“Why was an ummah that was so large and blessed with so many prophets—imagine how many thousands were sent to Beni Israel—Why was this ummah eventually stripped of prophethood and what caused them to bear thewrathof Allah as an ummah [religious community]?…The entire theme of the Beni Israel is that they were given multiple blessings and they did not respond in the way that they were supposed to.”