Days after Mikhail Yuksel, the leader of Sweden’s new pro-Islamic party, gloated publicly about “taking over” Skåne County, the province that is home to the increasingly infamous city of Malmö, one of the country’s most virulently radical Islamist preachers claimed Swedish land belongs to followers of Islam.
While delivering one of his rancorous, hate-filled sermons earlier this week, Imam Basem Mahmoud, a figure who has previously called for the mass murder of Jews, told his religious followers that Sweden belongs to Muslims, claiming that it’s only a matter of time before they take over the country, the Swedish news portal Samhållsnytt reports.
Inspired by social-media-fueled protests against social services earlier in the week, Mahmoud accused the Swedish state of, among other things, taking Muslim children away from their parents.
“They have started taking the children from the mothers’ stomachs,” he claimed. “They steal the children the moment they are born.”
“The Swedish schools and social services are the most corrupt of all institutions in Sweden. They are Sweden’s dirtiest stain of shame. They are manipulating the children of Muslims. But Muslims and Muslim children are here to stay. And Sweden is ours. It’s ours, whether [Swedes] like it or not. In ten to fifteen years, it will be ours.”
In December 2021, Swedish social services took custody of Mahmoud’s 17-year-old daughter after she told authorities that “she had been mentally and physically abused at home for a long time.” Per court documents obtained by Samhållsnytt, the girl said Mahmoud imposed a draconian ‘honor culture’ on the household. According to the news outlet, Mahmoud has an older daughter who had been subjected to honor violence in the household, and as a result, now lives in a home for abused women.
Mahmoud, a Jordanian-born immigrant who came to Sweden in 1989 after marrying a Swedish Islamic convert, is one of the most high-profile imams in Rosengård, a heavily foreign-populated, high crime, ‘no-go’ district in the central Malmö, where coincidentally, most of the city’s state-funded housing is located. In 2019, the district had become so dangerous that the international courier company UPS chose to stop delivering to it.
Following the 2008 Malmö mosque riots, which saw hundreds of ‘youths’ attack police with rocks and fireworks in response to the closure of a basement, Islamic cultural center in Rosengård, Mahmoud was presented to the media as the ‘spokesman’ for the disaffected ‘youths.’ At the time, police described the unrest as the “most violent riots that they had ever encountered.”
In 2020, Mahmoud, who is not a stranger to making controversial statements, defended the Islamist terrorist beheading of the French secondary school teacher Samuel Paty, who during a lesson on freedom of expression, showed his students Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet.
In the wake of the brutal murder, Mahmoud said: “A person who loves his religion and who gets angry and slaughters the teacher with a knife in the gutter, as the teacher is unclean and the gutter is the only place he belongs. It’s a simple equation. One of them sinned by insulting the Prophet, and one of us sinned and killed the teacher who insulted the Prophet.”
Mahmoud, together with his Swedish Islam covert ex-wife, has seven children. According to his ex-wife, who apparently requested several restraining orders against her ex-husband, Mahmoud over time became “increasingly religious and controlling.”
