A trustee for Britain’s largest Muslim charity has resigned after Facebook posts came to light in which he called Jews the “grandchildren of monkeys and pigs”, JTA reported on Sunday.
The Times of London first reported the posts by Heshmat Khalifa, who sat on the Board of Trustees of Islamic Relief Worldwide.
The organization announced in a statement later on Friday that Khalifa had resigned.
“These (offensive views) have no place in our organization. We are appalled by the hateful comments he made and unreservedly condemn all forms of discrimination, including anti-Semitism,” the statement also said. “We are fully committed to reviewing our processes for screening trustees and senior executives’ social media posts to ensure that this will not happen again.”
Khalifa, who launched the organization’s Australia office and was one of five trustees, made the posts in 2014 and 2015. They also reportedly called the Hamas terrorist organization “the purest resistance movement in modern history,” and said Egypt’s president was a “Zionist pimp.”
“Khalifa has acknowledged that these posts were unacceptable and has apologized for falling short of the strict standards expected by our code of conduct,” the charity organization said in its statement.
The organization, which provides humanitarian support in dozens of countries, receives more than $765 million a year from the United States and from British taxes, according to the London-based Jewish News.
Meanwhile, British rapper Wiley has been dropped by his management after he made a series of anti-Semitic social media posts over the weekend.
That incident came after a British university lecturer was fired for pushing stereotypes, including that “Jewish people are the cleverest in the world.”
Anti-Semitism has been on the rise in Britain in recent years. In 2019, the number of anti-Semitic incidents documented in Britain increased for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record tally of 1,805 cases.