Saturday, April 22, 2017

After receiving death threats, imam vows to fight extremism, and opens up about his own brush with it


MISSISSAUGA — The photo emailed to Ibrahim Hindy showed five men hanging by their necks. “Islamic wind chimes,” the email read. Around the same time, a message arrived calling his mosque “one of many satan safe houses that need to be burned to the ground.”

The 33-year-old reported the troubling messages to police in Mississauga, Ont., where he lives and serves as imam at the Dar Al-Tawheed Islamic Centre, but he also took to Facebook on Tuesday to say enough is enough. “We have to make this stop,” he wrote.

The threats were the culmination of months of anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from some opponents of a Peel District School Board policy that accommodates Friday prayers on school grounds for Muslim students.

Groups fighting the board have called Islam evil and its prophet a child-rapist. They have urged the banning of Islam and the mass deportation of Muslims. “It’s almost all-out war here,” one of them said after ripping up a Qur’an during a school board meeting.

As a member of the school board’s faith advisory committee who had supported the policy, Hindy has been targeted online as a radical and criminal. He was told he was being watched and that he should have stayed silent.  (more...)


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