New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, celebrated Ramadan at a mosque whose co-founder was convicted of funneling money to Hamas and with an imam who faced deportation proceedings over alleged Hamas ties. This imam also called for a “new intifada.”
“Thank you to the Islamic Center of Passaic County for welcoming me to join their celebration as the holy month of Ramadan comes to a close,” Sherrill wrote in a Facebook post with pictures of her in a headscarf visiting the mosque and meeting with Imam Mohammad Qatanani.
“I just want to thank the community,” she said in a brief speech Friday. “This is a community with the five pillars of Islam that is constantly looking to do good works, constantly looking out for your brothers and sisters who are struggling, and that is something that I think is really lacking right now in this country.”
Sherrill also thanked “the sisters in the back.” Most mosques segregate women in a separate prayer area, often at the back.
One of the pictures Sherrill posted shows the governor sitting next to Imam Mohammad Qatanani, as The Washington Free Beacon reported.
Qatanani, a Jordan-born imam who came to the United States on a work visa in 1996, faced deportation proceedings last year before a court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could not remove him.
The Israeli military claimed that Qatanani had provided support to Hamas, and imprisoned him in 1993, according to court documents. Immigration courts said the Israeli military documents stating that Qatanani had confessed to supporting Hamas had “low evidentiary weight.” When Qatanani applied for lawful permanent residence in 1999, he checked a box saying he had not been imprisoned for violating a law within or outside the U.S.
In December 2017, Qatanani gave a speech in New York City’s Times Square opposing President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. During the speech, he reportedly called for “a new intifada,” which DHS equated to a call for violence. (Qatanani maintained that he was not advocating violence, but peaceful methods of political opposition.)
Yet Qatanani is not the only potential tie between the mosque that Sherrill visited and Hamas.
In 2008, a jury convicted Mohammad El-Mezain, a cofounder of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, of funneling money to Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation. The jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Mohammad Al-Hanooti, whom the magazine Islamic Horizons identified as an imam at the center in the 1990s, allegedly raised $6 million for Hamas. Al-Hanooti denied the allegations.
Sherrill’s meeting at the mosque comes amid multiple attacks from supporters of radical Islamism after the start of the Iran war.
New Jersey’s Muslim population doubled between 2010 and 2020, and the Garden State now has more than 321,000 Muslims. Muslims made up about 6.6% of religious adherents in New Jersey in 2020, and 3.5% of the state’s overall population, according to New Jersey Spotlight News.
