Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles office, speaking at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, Dec. 1, 2023: Photo: Screenshot

Israel “does not have the right” to defend itself from Palestinian violence, and for the Palestinians “every single day” since the Jewish state’s establishment has been comparable to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, according to the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Los Angeles office (CAIR-LA).

“For 75 years, every single day for the Palestinian people had been October 7,” Hussam Ayloush said while delivering a sermon at the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City in the US state of Oklahoma on Friday.

Ayloush was referring to Hamas’ onslaught across southern Israel on Oct. 7, when the Palestinian terror group invaded the Jewish state, murdered 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted 240 others, taking them back to Gaza.

Ayloush’s sermon was first reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute and posted online by CAIR’s Oklahoma branch.

In his remarks, Ayloush also seemed to rationalize the Hamas atrocities and condemn Israel’s defensive war in response to them, arguing the Jewish state does not have the right to defend itself.

“Israel does not have the right to defend itself, as an occupier to defend itself from the occupied,” he said. “No, it doesn’t. This is not a rhetorical thing — it doesn’t, legally, under international law. No occupier has the right defend itself from the occupied.”

Ayloush then compared Israel to Nazi Germany, apparently drawing a moral equivalence between the lone democracy in the Middle East and the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

“Imagine we tell Nazi Germany: ‘You have the right to defend yourself against French resistance, or Polish resistance, or Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.’ People would laugh at you if you said that,” he claimed. “Imagine if you said that Russia has the right to defend itself against Ukrainian resistance — you don’t. As long as you are an occupier, you do not have the right to resist, or to defend yourself.”

“Guess who has the right to defend themselves?” Ayloush asked. “The Palestinians.”

Ayloush went on to argue that people trust news from “on the ground photojournalists” putting their content on social media rather than traditional media outlets, before accusing Israel without evidence of faking the deaths of Israelis.

“You can’t fake the image of dead children. You can’t fake the image of dying parents. You can’t fake the image of burying, you know, people crying,” he said. “You can fake one or two if you want to be the Israeli government, etc., as they do once in a while, right?”

The CAIR-LA director then touted Al Jazeera as “the most credible, most comprehensive of the outlets providing material on what is happening there, English or Arabic.”

Al Jazeera was established by the Qatari royal family, which has infamously hosted senior Hamas leaders for years. Qatar, along with Iran and Turkey, has also provided a large portion of the Palestinian terror group’s budget.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), meanwhile, “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.”

Critics have accused CAIR of being sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and a creation of the Islamist movement’s broad network. Hamas is a Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

CAIR has previously disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim about its Hamas links, asserting that the Muslim advocacy group “unequivocally condemns all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al Qaeda, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.'”

In October, the ADL criticized CAIR for signing on to a statement of the US Council of Muslim Organizations following the Oct. 7 massacre that “ignored Hamas’ violence against Israeli civilians and instead called for the United States and world governments to ‘exert pressure on Israel’ to stop its ‘atrocities’ against the Palestinians.”

The head of the ADL has previously lambasted CAIR for backing racist and antisemitic statements made by one of its executive directors, accusing both of “blatant antisemitism.”

CAIR-LA and Ayloush didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.