For the third time in the past six months, a high-positioned figure at Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) has left for expressing antisemitic views on social media.
Tayeb Abdoun, former interim-CEO and a 25-year veteran employee at the international humanitarian relief agency, resigned on October 14 for posting a picture on Facebook of a knife with a thumbs up, writing, “Lay the bodies of the Jews on the top of the mountains, so that no dog in Palestine must suffer hunger.”
On October 13, 2015, three Israelis were killed in a Jerusalem gun and knife attack in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood.
Abdoun resigned after the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger (TA) confronted him.
“We continue to work as an organization to root out anyone that does not meet our core values as a respectful, faith-sensitive, non-discriminatory and principled charity,” IRW wrote on October 14.
IRW founder Hany El Banna had recently called the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq “devil worshippers.”
TA wrote that “the false cliché of the devil worshipper served as a justification for the IS [Islamic State] to kill thousands of Yazidi in Northern Iraq or to rape their women as sex slaves.”
Abdoun has also commented on other issues and events, as reported in TA.
After the attacks carried out by the Islamic State in Paris, Abdoun quoted an Arabic text on his Facebook page showing that Western countries were the real terrorists, as well as a rhetorical question about the real difference between Christians, Jews and the devil.
