An imam in Michigan said Muslims in Western countries need to embrace jihad and emphasize the importance of becoming a martyr.
“Yes, there is holy war in Islam. It is jihad,” Ahmad Musa Jibril said in videos posted on social media. “This may be a surprise to many who grew up in the West, especially those who were born or grew up post 9/11, because of the growing number of hypocrites who are spreading the American-Zionist Islam. And it has nothing to do with Islam, that version of Islam … suits the enemies.”
Security experts determined Jibril was one of the most influential online recruiters of ISIS amid the terrorist group’s rise, Newsmax reported. One of the terrorists in the deadly London Bridge attack in 2017 was reportedly a significant follower of Jibril’s, according to the New York Post.
“The Muslims in the West, especially the youth in the West, especially the youth in America, need to wake up,” Jibril said in the posted video. “The current events are a wake-up call for Muslims to start normalizing mentioning jihad’s proper meaning and putting it back into their vocabulary. Jihad must be a common, normal term on your tongues, on your social media, and in the mosques and elsewhere.”
Jibril later called President Joe Biden a “terrorist” in the video and criticized the United States for supporting “genocide in Palestine.”
“It is about time that the Muslims — especially the youth — in the West, it is time for them to understand what should already be known, that the infidel West, particularly the U.S., are the enemies of Muslims,” he said. “If you can’t raise your child telling him you want him to be mujahid and martyr, then you are the root of the problem.”
The comments continue a trend among some American imams expressing anti-Israel views sympathetic to the violence of Islamic terrorists amid the current Israel-Hamas war.
Omar Suleiman, a Texas imam, previously called Israel a “terrorist regime” and warned that “the beginning of the end of Zionism is here,” as reported by The Dallas Express. Suleiman has campaigned for several prominent Democrats.
“We ask Allah to humiliate this Israel, the way that Allah humiliated Beni Israel,” he said in a 2012 discourse. “We ask Allah to humiliate those who occupy the ‘land of [Palestine].’”
