German Millî Görüş Organization Fires Imam Over Anti-Semitic Comments

Ger­man Jew­ish media is report­ing that the Ger­man Mil­lî Görüş orga­ni­za­tion has fired one of its imams over anti-Semit­ic com­ments. Accord­ing to the Jüdis­che All­ge­meine report:

Jan­u­ary 28, 2022: The Islam­ic com­mu­ni­ty Mil­li Görüs (IGMG) has dis­missed an imam because of anti-Semit­ic state­ments in a video on the plat­form Insta­gram. This was announced by IGMG Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al Bekir Altas at the request of the “Welt” (Fri­day). The imam in ques­tion, from Bonn, Ger­many, had uploaded a video on the plat­form in May 2021, which last­ed more than an hour, on the ten­sions between Israel and Pales­tini­ans. In it, the imam accused Israel of a “geno­cide” — “just as it also hap­pened in Ger­many at that time with the Jews.” When he called Israel a “coun­try,” the imam formed quo­ta­tion marks in the air with his fin­gers. “We are not against Judaism either. (…) To each his own. But we are against Zion­ists,” the imam said. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, unfor­tu­nate­ly,” 99.9 per­cent of Zion­ists are Jews, he said. The Zion­ists’ “world order” is well known, he said: ” ‘We are the gold­en race,’ they say. ‘We must kill the Mus­lims. We must mas­sacre them.’ “Bekir Altas, sec­re­tary gen­er­al of the IGMG, said he became aware of the con­tent through the “Welt” inquiry: “The state­ments are anti-Semit­ic and unac­cept­able. We imme­di­ate­ly con­tact­ed the imam and urged him to stop fur­ther dis­tri­b­u­tion of the video.” [Trans­lat­ed by DeepL]

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Islamis­che Gemein­schaft Mil­lî Görüş (IGMG) is a part of the Mil­lî Görüş move­ment, a Turk­ish reli­gious and polit­i­cal move­ment found­ed by Necmet­tin Erbakan, Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s polit­i­cal men­tor and which has called for an end to the sec­u­lar regime in Turkey. The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) has report­ed that accord­ing to the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, Erdoğan’s AKP par­ty has inten­si­fied its rela­tions with Mil­lî Görüş in Germany.