A Muslim preacher has been reported to the UK police after voicing support for Palestinians and their right to resist the Israeli occupation.
West Yorkshire police were handed a dossier filled with remarks of Sheikh Jaffer Ladak, the imam of the Baab-Ul-Ilm Center in Leeds, has made since Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, media reports said Thursday.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians. Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed more than 30,878 Palestinians and injured over 72,402 others.
In a video, Ladak slammed the Western media’s biased coverage of the war and how they ask whether Muslims should “condemn Hamas”, to which he responded, “The answer is actually no, why should we condemn?”
In another clip, the cleric compared Hamas’ Al-Aqsa Storm Operation to Jews breaking out of concentration camps and attacking Nazis.
“So why should you condemn when the people of Gaza break out of their concentration camp and attack the military bases around them?”
Ladak also stressed, in a sermon, that resistance is Palestinians’ legitimate right under international law.
“Allah has given permission for people to fight back because they have been oppressed” and that “from the perspective of international law, it is the right of the Gazans to fight off their oppressors, at any moment that they see fit, and in any way they see fit,” he said in a sermon, six days after the invasion of Gaza.
In the sermon, he noted “We have seen the Muslim ummah [community] come together, united in opposition of the atrocities carried out by the illegal and illegitimate Zionist state against our brothers and sisters, particularly in Gaza. Also in the West Bank and also in Lebanon and Syria.”
Ladak often appears on Press TV shows such as ‘Eye on Islam’ and ‘Gaza Under Attack’.
The mosque has denounced the police complaint as “ignominious Islamophobia.”
“It is absurd and baseless even to suggest that we would commit hate crime against any faith, race, or group of people,” they said in a statement to The Times.
“The allegations against us fail to demonstrate association with a proscribed organisation or that speeches were outside the remit of English law. Such unfounded accusations are ignominious Islamophobia.”
