An imam criticized Jews and blamed them for the Holocaust during a speech at a recent Muslim convention that was attended by several Jews interested in improving relations between Muslims and Jews. During his session at the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) annual convention, New York imam Warith Deen Umar said the Holocaust happened to the Jews “because they were serially disobedient to Allah”, and a small handful of Jews around President Obama “control the world.”
ISNA immediately condemned the comments. Jewish attendee Marc Schneier, president and founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and a keynote speaker at the ISNA convention, said that Islamic groups are too often condemned based on extreme outliers. “When you have 99.999% of the people saying good things and one person saying other things, you shouldn’t magnify the words of that one person,” Schneier said.