First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
TOP STORY
A Canadian Islamic preacher with a lengthy history of extremist rhetoric is under scrutiny once again after a sermon calling for the death of Jews.
“Oh Allah, destroy the Jews, oh Allah destroy the Jews … oh Allah destroy them for they are no match for you,” said Younus Kathrada in a sermon uploaded to the social media channels of the Dar al-Ihsan Islamic Centre in Victoria, B.C.
The April 18 sermon also praised the “bravery” of Palestinian children as young as 10 years old who expressed a wish to die as “martyrs” in armed combat against Israel.
“It’s the young girls as well … Did you not hear that little girl say: ‘I want to grow up, and I want to get married, and I want to give birth to and raise martyrs.’ Yes, by Allah. What kind of bravery is that?” he said in English.
Kathrada’s prayer calling for the destruction of Jews was then spoken in Arabic at the sermon’s end.
“This guy needs to be arrested or deported, before he does something to hurt someone here in Canada,” wrote B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad in a social media post appended to a video of the April 18 sermon.
On Sunday, the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation announced it had lodged an official complaint with the Victoria Police Department, arguing that Kathrada’s sermon met the threshold for hate speech.
Specifically, the group argued, Kathrada’s statements violate Section 318 of the Canadian Criminal Code, which prescribes prison terms of up to five years for “every person who advocates or promotes genocide.”
National Post reached out to Kathrada via the Dar al-Ihsan Islamic Centre for comment, but did not hear back by press time.
An excerpted video of the “destroy the Jews” sermon was circulated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit that provides translations of extremist media from across the Muslim world.
Kathrada has often been featured in MEMRI videos, going all the way back to 2018 when the group excerpted a sermon of him saying that a Muslim uttering Merry Christmas is a sin worse than adultery or murder.
“If a person were to commit every major sin … lying, murder, committing adultery, dealing with interest. If a person were to do all of those major sins they are nothing compared to the sin of congratulating and greeting the non-Muslims on their false festivals,” said Kathrada at the time.
In 2019, Kathrada urged his followers not to vote in that year’s federal election, declaring that every single candidate was “evil” for supporting homosexuality. “They are all evil. Every single one of them … They are all evil and filthy,” he said.
In 2020, after French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in an Islamic terrorist attack, Kathrada denounced the deceased as a “filthy excuse of a human being,” called for a boycott of all French goods, and prayed for the destruction of the “enemies of Islam.” “Oh Allah, support those who wage jihad for your sake everywhere,” said Kathrada.
Just two weeks after the April 18 “destroy the Jews” sermon, in fact, Kathrada can be heard praying in an April 27 video for the victory of the “mujahideen” in Kashmir. Five days prior, Islamist gunmen had murdered 26 tourists in the Indian-administered territory.
Despite all of this, Kathrada’s group, Muslim Youth of Victoria, has previously been a recipient of government grants. In 2021 and 2022, the group received a combined $5,000 from a City of Victoria fund intended for those who “own or operate cultural facilities.”
In 2024, Global News reported that Kathrada’s group had also received grants from the Islamic Society of B.C., a federally registered charity.
As recently as last November, Kathrada had been scheduled to speak on the campus of the University of Victoria at an event sponsored by the school’s Muslim Students Association.
“Join us for an insightful lecture by Sheikh Younus Kathrada on the significance of building strong ties within the Muslim community,” read an advertisement for the Nov. 24 lecture, which was ultimately cancelled by UVic administrators following reports by Global News and National Post.
Born in South Africa, Kathrada’s extremist rhetoric has been making headlines since at least 2005, when one of his former students at Vancouver’s Dar al-Madinah Islamic Society was killed by Russian forces reportedly after joining a Chechen jihadist group as an explosives expert. At the time, CBC obtained recordings of Kathrada sermons in which he referred to Jews as “the brothers of the monkeys and the swines.”
Although Kathrada was briefly subject to a security probe at the time, it yielded no charges.
IN OTHER NEWS
Although there are a few groups pushing for Alberta separation, one of the leading ones, Alberta Prosperity Project, unveiled the question they intend to ask in a future separation referendum. It is …
Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?
Under current Alberta law, the Alberta Prosperity Project will have to collect 600,000 signatures within 90 days in order to have the question taken up by Elections Alberta as an official referendum (However, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s government has introduced legislation to drop that threshold to 175,000). In any case, the draft referendum question is much more straightforward than the last time Canada had a secession vote. When Quebecers voted on separation in 1995, they faced ballots reading ….
Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?
At the last official count, Canada was just starting to see a slowdown in the extremely high rates of immigration that have defined much of the last three years. In the last quarter of 2024 the Canadian population increased by 63,382, almost entirely due to immigration. That still makes Canada one of the world’s highest-immigration countries, but it’s a marked decrease from the likes of 2023 or 2022, when the population was surging by more than one million per year. In the four months since, immigration intake has apparently continued to taper off enough that telecom companies are now complaining that it’s led to a decrease in new subscribers. Rogers, in particular, told investors its growth had slowed due to “slowing population growth as a result of changes to government immigration policies.”
Get all of these insights and more into your inbox by signing up for the First Reading newsletter here.
