Sweden: Green Party politician invites antisemitic Saudi cleric, says "everyone loves him"

Via The Local:

A Green Party politician in Malmö has taken a break from politics after it emerged that he had invited a notorious Islamist to speak in Malmö.

The junior coalition partners recent woes continued when newspaper Sydsvenskan revealed that Kamal al-Rifai had asked a well-known Saudi Salafist, Salman al-Ouda, to give a speech in Sweden’s third largest city.

Al-Rifai, an active party member in Burlöv and a Syrian Association board member, previously told Sydsvenskan he admired the 60-year-old al-Ouda, who has renounced his earlier support for violent jihadism. "Everyone loves him," said al-Rifai, who has invited al-Ouda to speak in Malmö's central Folkets Park this Saturday.

But al-Ouda remains faithful to views that are deeply patriarchal and conservative, and has expressed an array of anti-Semitic view, the newspaper reports. 

The ADL has more on some of al-Ouda's recent antisemitic views:

Holocaust denial, the blood libel and other vicious anti-Semitism marked last week’s episode of the weekly show Milad airing on multiple Arab satellite channels.

During the program, a weekly discussion with Dr. Salman al-Ouda, a prominent Saudi scholar and the Assistant Secretary General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, al-Ouda promoted the Arabic language translation of the Babylonian Talmud to support his anti-Semitic diatribe.

In one segment of the episode, al-Ouda said: “The Jews believe that they have the right to kill anyone who doesn’t believe in their religion — it’s stated in the Talmud.” He then told a story about a doctor who was asked by Jews to provide them with human blood to make pies. That story was followed by another description of Jews abducting children in Damascus in order to use their blood during Easter.

Al-Ouda then showed a copy of the newly released Arabic translation of the Talmud published by the Middle East Studies Center (MESC), a Jordan-based think tank. “The people who translated this book must be thanked,” he said. “…they gave us a weapon to confront our enemies, to expose the mentality of the Jews, to learn how they think and expose their scandals. The Jews were very upset with this translation and fought against it.”

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