Samer Naseredden said that Zionists “gaslight” Israel’s opponents and are planning to “oppress” Muslims in America.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
An outreach and political action campaign manager in an important Muslim-American organization went on an antisemitic, anti-Zionist rant in a recent sermon in California, press-monitoring watchdog MEMRI reported Saturday.
Samer Naseredden of the Los Angeles branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) delivered a sermon on July 12 in a local Islamic center in which he said that because “the Zionist entity,” meaning Israel, was “by the will of Allah, on the precipice of collapse,” it is “desperate.”
It has therefore made up “a victim narrative,” and is “gaslighting” people who attend “peaceful protests” in support of the Palestinians.
The Jewish state is trying to manipulate people “into thinking that the Palestinians are the ones who are at fault, and that we as Americans fighting for justice in this country were somehow at fault,” he said.
Naseredden specifically referred to the recent spate of encampments on college campuses, which were rife with calls for Israel’s destruction and turned into hate-fests against Jewish students.
The Zionists, charged the former Muslim chaplain at Northeastern University, “easily weave this narrative that they are violent, that they are antisemitic, etc.”
In response, he asked the attendees to fill out a questionnaire on “campus atmosphere” to oppose that narrative.
Naseredden then claimed “I’m not a conspiracy theorist” while peddling exactly that.
“They,” he said, referring to Jews, “are planning and setting the foundation for much oppression of Muslims in this country.”
Because of this, CAIR’s work of “political advocacy has never been more important,” said the fundraiser, so that “we build the collective Muslim power to ensure we can stop those bills and enact our own agenda of justice and truth.”
CAIR, which calls itself the leading Muslim advocacy organization in America, was one of 24 groups that the White House had listed in May 2023 as its partners in a national program to fight antisemitism.
This surprised many Jewish groups, which knew of many top CAIR officials’ blatant antisemitic statements and attitudes over the years.
They were dropped from the administration’s list in December, after CAIR director Nihad Awad was outed as having given a speech a few weeks after the Hamas October 7 invasion and massacre of 1,200 people, including the elderly and infants, in which he praised the terrorist organization.