Day: October 24, 2017

 

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

An imam in Toronto, Ayman Elkasrawy, prayed that Allah would kill all
the Jews. In a sane society, newspapers would be investigating the
prevalence of Islamic antisemitism in the area mosques, and among
Muslims in general. But this isn’t a sane society, this is Trudeau’s
Canada. So instead of focusing on Islamic antisemitism, the Toronto Star
has published this exhaustingly lengthy piece portraying Elkasrawy as
the real victim, a shy, inarticulate lug who wouldn’t hurt a fly,
especially a Jewish one, and whose words were mistranslated and
misrepresented by racist, bigoted right-wing “Islamophobes.” He didn’t
mean it, the Star tells us. In fact, says the Star’s Arabic experts, he
didn’t even say it. If it weren’t for those wicked right-wingers, Ayman
Elkasrawy and Jewish leaders in Toronto would be doing a happy
multicultural dance together, but instead, the reputation of this good,
gentle man has been unjustly sullied. But now here comes the Toronto
Star to justify the ways of Elkasrawy to man, and reassure everyone
about the glories of diversity.

But all the Toronto Star has to offer is a con job, as I explain below in comments interspersed in the Star article.

“A Toronto imam was accused of hate-preaching against Jews. But that wasn’t the whole story,” by Jennifer Yang, Toronto Star, October 22, 2017:

Ayman Elkasrawy got the phone call late on a Sunday night
in February. An incredulous friend was on the line, with a strange and
troubling question.
“Did you pray for the killing of the Jews?”
The friend sent him an online article about Masjid Toronto, the
downtown mosque where Elkasrawy worked as an assistant imam. It included
a video: rows of Muslim worshippers standing under fluorescent lights,
their eyes closed and hands cupped. At the front of the crowded room was
Elkasrawy, dressed in white and praying to God in Arabic.
“O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one
of them,” read the article’s translation of his prayers. “O Allah!
Purify Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews!”
Elkasrawy remembered the scene, filmed during Ramadan eight months
earlier. He also remembered praying for Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, a
bitterly contested holy site.
But he was shaken by the English translation. “I was surprised,” he
says. “When I (saw) that, I even doubted myself. Did I say that?”
Elkasrawy woke up the next morning feeling calamitously
misunderstood. He was bursting with things he wanted to explain, but he
also realized he had made serious mistakes, for which he needed to
apologize.
“Neither I, Masjid Toronto or the congregation harbour any form of
hate towards Jews,” he wrote on Twitter later that day. “And so I wish
to apologize unreservedly for misspeaking during prayers last Ramadan … I
sincerely regret the offence that my words must have caused.”
His apology only fanned the flames. Elkasrawy was suspended from his mosque and fired from Ryerson University,
where he worked as a teaching assistant. Toronto police opened a hate
crime investigation and condemnations rained down, from Parliament Hill
to the National Council of Canadian Muslims. Elkasrawy also became a
bogeyman in the federal Conservative party leadership race, cited in
campaign literature as an example of Muslim extremism….
Eight months later, the story is crystallized online as a putative
reminder of the hatred that can fester within Canadian society. A Google
search for “Ayman Elkasrawy” — once yielding just a smattering of
academic papers and social media profiles — now turns up pages of hits
that brand him a genocidal anti-Semite.
Offline, however, new layers of the story began to reveal themselves….
Elkasrawy’s prayers were undeniably problematic, but they were also
distorted to fit a certain narrative that gave his words added potency
amid rising anti-Islamic sentiment.
In a controversy that hinges on his words, a central question was
never fully investigated: Did Elkasrawy really say Jews were filth? Did
he really call for them to be killed?
According to several Arabic experts contacted by the Star, the answer is no….
Ayman Elkasrawy prefers not to speak at all, whenever he can help it.
At about six feet and 285 pounds, the bearded and bespectacled
32-year-old has an understated presence for someone who looms so large.
He speaks softly and hesitantly; in the presence of strangers, he tends
to fade into the background.
“I’m not so good at being social,” he says. “The more you talk, the more you make mistakes.”
Born and raised in a devout family in Egypt, Elkasrawy has dual
Canadian citizenship through his father, an agronomist who immigrated
here in 1976. He spent three summers with his dad in Toronto, “a
different planet” in the eyes of a 13-year-old kid from Cairo.

This is laying it on really thick. He is just a wide-eyed kid from
Cairo at heart, you see, hesitant to speak because he makes mistakes.
How can you greasy Islamophobes get mad at this poor lovable guy?

After university, he moved to Canada to continue his
education and is now at Ryerson pursuing a PhD in electrical
engineering. While he sometimes wears traditional dress at the mosque,
at Ryerson he blends easily with the campus crowd — just another grad
student riding his Bike Share in jeans, sneakers and a backpack that
looks slightly shrunken on his broad frame.
Elkasrawy and his wife, Somaia Youssef, found a religious community
in Masjid Toronto (“Toronto Mosque”) on Dundas St. W., located in an old
bank building near the bus terminal. The mosque opened in 2002 but did
not hire a resident imam until 2015, so it sometimes asked Elkasrawy —
who had memorized the Qur’an — to lead prayers or Friday sermons.
He was timid at first, even avoiding eye contact with congregants,
but received positive feedback and was officially hired as an assistant
imam in 2015. Elkasrawy sees this work as a spiritual duty and found
himself spending hours at the mosque nearly every day — not just leading
prayers, but also teaching and planning events, such as networking
socials for Muslim professionals. “I felt that’s like my second home,”
he says.
Over the years, Canada has become home for Elkasrawy as well. But as
with many immigrants, an invisible umbilical cord connects him to the
part of the world where he was born. His Twitter feed is dominated by
Egyptian and Middle Eastern politics. He mostly retweets accounts he
follows, including one called “Friends of Al-Aqsa.”
The silver-domed Al-Aqsa mosque is located on an elevated limestone
compound in East Jerusalem. The compound — known to Muslims as the Haram
al-Sharif and to Jewish people as the Temple Mount — is Islam’s third
holiest site (after Mecca and Medina), and Judaism’s holiest.
Over the past century, the compound has become an explosive flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 2000, a provocative visit by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon
sparked clashes that escalated into the deadly Second Intifada. This
summer, the mosque was at the centre of some of the worst violence, and
biggest demonstrations, Jerusalem has seen in years.

See, it was all Sharon’s fault, not that of the violent Muslim
fanatics who killed people because Sharon visited the Temple Mount.

For many in the Muslim and Jewish diasporas, stories
about the holy site are front-page news. On June 26, 2016, the latest
headlines were about a skirmish between Israeli police and Muslim
worshippers.
What people understood about the incident depended in part on the
media they consumed. According to the Arab press, Israeli officers
“stormed” Al-Aqsa mosque, beating worshippers and deploying tear gas and
rubber-tipped bullets. According to Jewish newspapers, “masked Arab
assailants” were arrested after hurling rocks, chairs and slurs at
Jewish tourists.
For Muslims, the Al-Aqsa violence was particularly alarming because
it broke out during the last 10 days of Ramadan, an especially sacred
time in Islam’s holiest month. So Elkasrawy decided to include the
mosque in his prayers at Masjid Toronto. “I thought maybe this will
help, praying together for this place,” he says….
Elkasrawy spent 10 minutes thanking God and asking for help — for
protection from evil and greed, for beneficial knowledge to humanity,
for good health, empathy, benevolence and love of the poor.
He then prayed for victimized Muslims around the world. He thought of
Syria, a recurring topic of prayer at his mosque, invoking a quote from
the Hadith (reports of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad
and his companions). He also prayed for Al-Aqsa, repeating a
supplication he had found on the internet earlier that day.
Meanwhile, someone was filming. This didn’t bother Elkasrawy; prayers
are sometimes recorded for worshippers unable to attend. When the
mosque posted the video on YouTube, he scanned various parts, curious
about his performance. Then he forgot about it.
The video sat there in its corner of the internet, barely seen. The
next time Elkasrawy watched it was eight months later, when he got the
phone call: “Did you pray for the killing of the Jews?”
On a sunny morning in May, Elkasrawy rode an elevator to the 34th
floor of a Bloor St. office tower, where two prominent members of
Toronto’s Jewish community awaited him.
Dressed in jeans and an electric blue sweatshirt, Elkasrawy sat
across a boardroom table from Bernie Farber — the one-time CEO of the
Canadian Jewish Congress — and Karen Mock, a former director with B’nai
Brith Canada and the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. He was also
joined by his mosque’s senior imam and officials from the Muslim
Association of Canada, which owns Masjid Toronto.
Everybody was there for Mock’s anti-racism workshop, one of five
sessions Farber had organized to educate an accused anti-Semite. The
mood was friendly and relaxed, with pleasantries and business cards
exchanged.
But those abhorrent words loomed over this group of newly acquainted
Muslims and Jews: “Purify Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the Jews!”
When it comes to Jewish-Muslim relations, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is the ever-present “elephant in the room,” Farber says — even
in Canada, where both minorities share the burden of religious
discrimination. According to Statistics Canada, Jewish people are the
most frequent targets of police-reported hate crimes, while attacks
against Muslims are the fastest-growing.
But there is also enormous diversity within both groups, which are
sometimes the source of one another’s pain. There is mounting concern
over anti-Semitism in certain corners of the Muslim world; meanwhile,
Jewish people on the far right are among the loudest voices in the
anti-Muslim movement. Israeli-Palestinian debates also have a tendency
to slide into accusations of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.
Farber, who once ran for the provincial Liberals, says Muslim issues
have become a divisive topic among Jewish Canadians. He says he has
received criticism from right-leaning members of his own community for
defending Muslim Canadians and for supporting M-103, the parliamentary motion to recognize and condemn Islamophobia, which prominent Jewish advocacy groups opposed.
But he remains a vocal ally of Canadian Muslims. After the Quebec
City mosque shooting in January, he joined people who gathered at
mosques to form “rings of peace” across the country — an act of
solidarity spearheaded by a Toronto rabbi that was covered by media
outlets around the world.
But just two weeks later, that feeling of solidarity crumbled.
“Supplications at Masjid Toronto Mosque: Slay them one by one and spare
not one of them,” read the headline on a story published by CIJ News, an
obscure right-wing website that has since been taken down….
The imam said he wanted to gain a better understanding of Canadian
norms and values, in the hopes of learning from his mistakes. Farber —
who once helped a repentant neo-Nazi leave her white supremacist
organization — agreed to help.
Given the disturbing anti-Semitic prayers Farber had read about in
the news, his initial plan was to prescribe intensive anti-racism
training. But he changed his mind after meeting Elkasrawy.
“We’re not dealing with a racist or anti-Semite,” he says of his gut
reaction. “I really saw a young man who felt beaten down for something
that he didn’t quite understand.”
Farber switched gears. He organized five workshops to help Elkasrawy
develop a better understanding of Canada’s cultural, legal and human
rights landscape. (The workshops were provided at no cost, though the
mosque later made a small donation to the charity.)
Elkasrawy learned about anti-racism, hate crime laws and Canada’s
human rights framework. He also visited his first synagogue — Beth
Tzedec, Canada’s largest Jewish congregation — where he learned about
Judaism and discussed interfaith issues with a rabbi and reverend.
Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl did not ask Elkasrawy to explain himself,
but he expressed how his language was harmful. “We are concerned about
discrimination against Muslims,” he said, as Elkasrawy nodded. “But we
are also concerned about extremism that comes out of the Islamic
community.
“Our people hear the extremism and when you speak that way, that’s what they hear. They become afraid. And they become angry.”
During each session, Elkasrawy listened intently and occasionally
jotted notes. He also asked questions, including one he repeated several
times: “How do you speak (clearly)? How do you tell things?”
When the program ended, Farber reached a conclusion. “I just do not
believe that Ayman is a hateful person,” he says. “He came in here with
an open heart and a real willingness to understand.”
But he still couldn’t wrap his head around the words Elkasrawy had
been accused of saying, or the imam’s muddled attempts to explain
himself.
Two things were clear: Elkasrawy was sorry. He also felt misunderstood.
“I made this mistake,” he said at one point. “But not that mistake.”
Translation is not an exact science. Words are like prisms,
refracting different shades of meaning. A good translation is one that
captures the right hue.
Elkasrawy’s prayers were first translated on CIJ News, a website founded and edited by Jonathan Dahoah Halevi.
Halevi describes himself as a retired lieutenant-colonel and
intelligence officer with the Israel Defense Forces, who now researches
the Middle East and radical Islam. He learned Arabic in school and
university, he once explained to an interviewer.
He has also been a go-to pundit for the now-defunct Sun News Network
and its offshoot Rebel News, a right-wing media website that has drawn
controversy for its anti-Muslim coverage….

Thus the Star semaphores to its Leftist readers that Halevi is a “right-winger,” and hence not to be trusted.

Halevi has also written extensively about Islam and
Muslim Canadians on CIJ News, where his Arabic translations have drawn
praise from the “anti-Islamist” blog Point de Bascule. “His knowledge of
the Arabic language gives him an advantage when it comes to
understanding the ambitions of the enemy,” the Quebec-based blog wrote
last year.
On Feb. 18, CIJ News published a story about Masjid Toronto, which
included his translation of Elkasrawy’s controversial prayers.
Halevi later told the Toronto Sun that he was prompted to dig up the
material after reading media coverage of a rally outside the mosque.
The rally was ostensibly to protest the federal Islamophobia motion,
but demonstrators brought signs that read “Say no to Islam” and “Muslims
are terrorists.” The protest was roundly criticized, including by local
politicians who denounced it as an Islamophobic “display of ignorance
and hate.”
But in his interview with the Sun, Halevi suggested the real hate was happening inside the mosque. “The double standard and hypocrisy was appalling,” he said.
After the story broke, Masjid Toronto took all its videos offline but
it was too late; a new, edited clip was posted on YouTube, crediting
Halevi with its translation and referencing an extreme anti-Muslim
ideology known as “counter-jihad.” The account hosting the clip also
mentions “Vlad Tepes Blog” in its video description.
The “counter-jihad” is described by researchers as a loose network of
people and groups united by the belief that Muslims are plotting to
take over the West. A recent National Post investigation
described Rebel News as a “global platform” for the counter-jihad, and
linked Vlad Tepes Blog — regarded as a key website in the movement — to a
frequent Rebel News contributor.
Rebel jumped on the story about Elkasrawy’s prayers, which it
credited “our friend Jonathan Halevi” with breaking. In a video segment,
“Rebel commander” Ezra Levant plays the YouTube clip while imploring
his viewers to “look at what the folks inside the mosque were saying.”
“Look at the translation written on the screen,” Levant says in the
video, which has now drawn more than 35,000 views. “Here they are
talking about Jews — there’s a lot of Jews in Toronto — and how they
need to be killed one by one.”
But such stories contained a glaring oversight: this was not at all what Elkasrawy said.
This is the consensus that emerged from five Arabic experts who
independently analyzed Elkasrawy’s prayers at the Star’s request. The
experts — from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom — are
Arabic translators, linguists and university professors with published
book chapters, academic papers and textbooks. None of them knows
Elkasrawy.
The experts found that the imam’s prayers were not without fault, and
many clarified that they do not condone or excuse some of the language
he used.
But they also described the initial, widely circulated translation as
“mistranslated,” “decontextualized” and “disingenuous.” One said it had
the hallmarks of a “propaganda translation.”
The YouTube clip was particularly troubling for Arabic sociolinguist
and dialectologist Atiqa Hachimi, an associate professor at the
University of Toronto.
This is because the clip was digitally manipulated: the first two
seconds were cut and pasted from a different prayer Elkasrawy had made
two minutes earlier. A slanted translation then transformed this Quranic
verse from “Thou art our Protector. Help us against those who stand
against faith” to “Give us victory over the disbelieving people.”
“It changed their meaning in such a way as to promote the dangerous
myths that violent extremism and hate are inherent to Islam,” Hachimi
said.
Elkasrawy also was not referring to Jewish people when he said “slay
them one by one,” a line from the Hadith that is often invoked as a cry
for divine justice. This line was misunderstood as being part of his
prayer about Al-Aqsa mosque; in fact, it was the closing line in a
previous supplication that he made on behalf of suffering Muslims around
the world, Hachimi said.

The video is above. It has not been digitally manipulated, and its
continuity is obvious. Elkasrawy, showing no signs of being shy or
inarticulate, prays: “O Allah! Destroy anyone who killed Muslims. O
Allah! Destroy anyone who displaced the sons of the Muslims. O Allah!
Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them. O
Allah! Purify Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews!” So yes, he was
indeed not referring to the Jewish people when he said “slay them one
by one.” He was referring to “anyone who killed Muslims,” a larger group
that would certainly, in Elkasrawy’s view, include the Jews who were
supposedly oppressing the “Palestinians.”
Thus the Star and Atiqa Hachimi are technically correct: Elkasrawy
wasn’t praying for the killing of the Jews. He was praying for the
killing of the Jews and other people as well.

As for “Purify the Al-Aqsa mosque from the filth of the
Jews,” a more accurate translation is “Cleanse Al-Aqsa mosque from the
Jews’ desecration of it,” according to Nazir Harb Michel, an Arabic
sociolinguist and Islamophobia researcher at Georgetown University in
Washington, D.C.
The crucial word here is danas. Arabic-English dictionaries
list several possible definitions — among them “besmirch,” “defile,” and
spiritual “impurity” or “filth” — so context is key in determining the
appropriate translation. Harb Michel said “no translator worth two
cents” would choose the “filth” definition in the context of Elkasrawy’s
prayer.

How striking that Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Muslim organization, would
repeatedly use, in English, exactly the same expression that the Toronto
Star is claiming is a mistranslation! But the Star keeps digging:

When danas is used in reference to a holy place —
like Al-Aqsa — the common definition is “desecration,” the experts
agreed. “He does not say ‘the filth of the Jews,’” said Jonathan
Featherstone, a senior teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh
and former Arabic lecturer with the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth
Office.
But what did Elkasrawy mean by “desecration”? Again, context is
instructive. Days before his prayers, he and his congregants were
reading reports of Israeli police deploying tear gas and rubber-tipped
bullets inside Al-Aqsa mosque — actions many Muslims would consider to
be a desecration of the site, especially during the 10 holiest days of
Ramadan.
Elkasrawy now realizes how wrong it was to mention “the Jews,”
especially since his intention was to pray for the mosque, not against
people.
“If I could say it in a more clear way,” he says, “it would be ‘O
Allah, protect the Al-Aqsa mosque from occupation. Or preserve the
sacredness of the Al-Aqsa mosque from violation.’”
He said “Jews” is widely used in the Arabic-speaking world to mean
“Israeli forces” or “Israeli occupiers,” not as a sweeping reference to
all ethnic and religious Jews. But he acknowledges this common usage is
problematic. And, he asks, “How is it perceived in my (current)
community? It’s something I didn’t take into account.”

“He said ‘Jews’ is widely used in the Arabic-speaking world to mean
‘Israeli forces’ or ‘Israeli occupiers,’ not as a sweeping reference to
all ethnic and religious Jews.” All right. But remember: Elkasrawy
prayed: “O Allah! Count their number; slay them one by one and spare not
one of them.” If he didn’t mean all Jews, but just the “Israeli
occupiers,” it would have been kind of him to pray: “O Allah! Count
their number; slay them one by one and spare not one of them, except the
Jews who aren’t ‘Israeli occupiers.’”

“I have never thought of anything against people of
Jewish faith,” he says. “In Islam, we believe that no one should be
forced into any religion. We cannot hate any people, any group, because
of their ethnicity or their religion.”

In reality, the Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent
on destroying the well-being of the Muslims. They are the strongest of
all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things
and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that
Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41);
they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are
disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people
(3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their
guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to
their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil
for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others
are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s
beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161);
slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing
the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping
their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in
committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly
(4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath
(2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse
(9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them
under Islamic hegemony (9:29).

Halevi declined requests for a phone interview but, in
emailed responses, he stood by his original translation of Elkasrawy’s
prayers. He did not answer specific questions, including why he chose
the “filth” definition, but sent links to various websites and
Arabic-English dictionaries.
He also did not answer questions about the source of the digitally
manipulated clip, saying only that the original video was available on
his website until the mosque deleted its YouTube channel.
But Halevi provided context that he considered important: excerpts
from Islamic books that promote praying against disbelievers;
translations of violent, aggressive or anti-Semitic statements made by
other Muslims; links to CIJ News, which Halevi took down shortly after
being contacted by the Star.
“Canadian imams deny any rights of the Jews over the Temple Mount or in (the) Land of Israel/Palestine,” Halevi wrote.
B’nai Brith Canada said two Arabic experts independently verified the
original translation before the group urged Ryerson to fire Elkasrawy.
B’nai Brith said it also reached out to the imam on Facebook but did not
get a response. (Elkasrawy deleted his account shortly after the story
broke.)
“Statements like this have been made in many parts of the world and
it’s actually been used directly as incitement,” said B’nai Brith CEO
Michael Mostyn. “Jewish people have lost their lives over statements
like this.”
Mostyn rejects the linguistic opinions obtained by the Star, in one
case accusing an expert of having an anti-Israel bias. But he would not
identify his own translators, citing concerns over their safety. The
Star’s request to interview them anonymously was also declined.
In response to the Star’s questions, B’nai Brith solicited a third
opinion from Mordechai Kedar, an assistant professor with the Arabic
department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.
In a phone interview, Kedar did not remember being asked to evaluate
Elkasrawy’s entire supplications, just the phrase that referred to
“Jews” and danas. But he said he didn’t need any context to
interpret Elkasrawy’s prayers because “when it comes to what Israel is
doing, it is the worst meaning of the word.”
“Nobody should give them the benefit of the doubt that they mean
something else, because they don’t,” he said. “(They want) to make the
mainstream media in the free world believe them that they are the
targets, when they are the problem in the whole world.”
Like Halevi, Kedar is a former Israeli intelligence officer and media
pundit. His views have also drawn controversy, and Kedar once served on
the advisory board for Stop Islamization of Nations — an organization
co-founded by the anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller and designated a
hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a U.S.-based civil rights
watchdog.

So you see, Kedar must be a bad guy, like Halevi. Whatever the Toronto Star may be, it isn’t subtle.

Kedar argued Elkasrawy’s language was “meant to create a religiously charged rage and anger against the Jews.”
“Reacting violently against (Jewish people) in revenge for their deed
is almost a required reaction,” he wrote in an email. “You can call it,
in one word, terrorism.”
B’nai Brith Canada has not gone so far as to allege verbal terrorism,
and said it is glad Elkasrawy has undergone cultural training, but its
position remains unmoved: “Mr. Elkasrawy’s message at the mosque was
irrefutably offensive and anti-Semitic.”
Farber feels differently. He says Elkasrawy chose his language
poorly, especially when he referred to “the Jews,” and failed to
understand the harmful impact of his words.
But he now believes Elkasrawy’s prayers were misrepresented to the
public. Like many people, Farber accepted the initial translation
unquestioningly, but now says “if people were going to take that and
ruin lives, we should have been a lot more careful.”
“He said something that’s highly charged and highly political and
could be anti-Zionist — but it’s not anti-Semitic,” Farber says. “And
that changes the flavour of this.”…

Why does Farber says that Elkasrawy’s words were not antisemitic?
Because he doesn’t want them to be. He likes Elkasrawy and wants to
believe the best. If, on the other hand, some “white supremacist” made a
similar statement about “the Jews,” Farber would not likely be so
understanding.

Prayers like “slay them one by one” also have no place
inside a Canadian mosque, says Mohammad Aboghodda, a lecturer with the
Understanding Islam Academy, an educational charity in Mississauga.
Aboghodda was one of the Arabic translators consulted by the Star.
This quote from the Hadith has a specific reference to ancient
Islamic struggles but is sometimes used in prayers for divine justice;
Elkasrawy says he invoked it on behalf of Syrian people killed and
tortured by the government regime or by Daesh (ISIS) terrorists.
But Aboghodda finds this language inappropriate, even if well
intentioned — it would be like a priest delivering a Sunday sermon and
quoting Bible verses that say “wrongdoers will be completely destroyed.”
“That’s a very common old prayer, but it implies violence that we
don’t need,” he says. “I think many young and novice imams go to the old
books and just copy these from it.”
These were some of the concerns Muslim groups had in mind when they
denounced Elkasrawy’s prayers — public statements that many took as an
implicit acceptance of the initial translation. But those statements did
not reveal whether the Muslim community thought the translation was
accurate, or whether they understood Elkasrawy’s words at all.
How many Canadian Muslims speak Arabic? Contrary to assumption, only
about 20 per cent of the world’s Muslims are native Arabic speakers;
according to the latest census, 1.2 per cent of Canadians cite Arabic as
their mother tongue. Quranic Arabic, which Elkasrawy used in his
prayers, is also notoriously complex and difficult to deconstruct.
Hachimi pointed out that several Arabic-language newspapers also
clearly relied on English reports of the incident, because when they
back-translated the word “filth,” they chose a different Arabic word — najas — from the one Elkasrawy used in his prayers.
And who bothered to check the original video? The translation was not
verified by the National Council of Canadian Muslims, executive
director Ihsaan Gardee confirmed in an emailed statement.
He said the organization is now “deeply troubled” to learn that the
widely circulated clip of Elkasrawy’s prayers was manipulated and the
translations called into question. But in the fast-moving aftermath of
the scandal, he said, the organization “could only respond to what was
being reported” — in other words, it reacted to the CIJ News
translation.
“Unfortunately, we are living in a time where the very worst is
believed about Canadian Muslims — contrary to the reality that the vast
majority are contributing positively…

So now we come to the real point of the Toronto Star article: when a
Muslim prays for the killing of the Jews, it is Muslims who are the
victims. As always.
_______________________________________________________