Canadian border authorities interrogated and refused to let into the country the director of the Muslim Association of Britain, who had denied the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacres in Israel.
Immigration officials in Montreal had questioned Anas Altikriti, a dual citizen of the U.K. and Iraq, at Montreal’s main airport for 11 hours before escorting him to a London-bound airplane, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Altikriti had planned to speak at a Muslim Association of Canada convention in Toronto on May 16-18, the report said.
In a statement, the Muslim Association of Canada said that the Canadian government had committed a “serious overreach,” driven by “bad-faith pressure from those seeking to suppress voices speaking out against Israel’s crimes and the genocide in Gaza.”
Altikriti has described the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres as “a lie” and called the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance,” in a video recorded with Tom Facchine, a U.S.-based imam, in November 2023, the newspaper reported.
He said: “The taking of hostages is a very important part of any strategic sort of military action or act of resistance or the such because for every hostage you can then negotiate.”
On X, Altikriti posted comments that justified the massacres, in which Hamas terrorists murdered some 1,200 people. “What did we think was going to happen? That Palestinians would stay silent whilst forever subjugated, victimised, abused, violated, murdered and tortured?! This is for every time Western governments stayed silent and whitewashed Israel’s crimes and violations,” he wrote.
The Muslim Association of Canada was founded by Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, a former Hamas chief, and was one of the groups that organized a pro-Palestine march in London on Armistice Day, a month after the Oct. 7 massacre, according to The Telegraph.
The Israeli ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, called that country “one of the centers of antisemitism globally,” speaking during a visit to a synagogue in Thornhill in York, Ontario, that was shot at earlier this year. He told local media that he’d seen “a rising trend in antisemitism” following his arrival in Canada in August 2023, and after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, a “dramatic spike” occurred.
