An imam? Wait, what? There must be some mistake. How could someone who has dedicated his life to understanding Islam properly and communicating it effectively somehow get the idea that Islam commands violence against unbelievers? Surely that most learned of imams, Pope Francis, is on his way to San Donà di Piave right now, in order to explain to him that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
“Terrorism, the Interior Ministry expels the imam of San Donà di Piave,” translated from “Terrorismo, il Viminale espelle l’imam di San Donà di Piave,” Corriere Della Sierra, August 4, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
It is not the first time that San Donà resounds with the echoes of radicalism. Already in 2014, a sermon against Jews was circulated on the web in which a guest imam implored Allah to “count them one by one and kill them to the last”, so that he was expelled. Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese did the same with three radicalized subjects, including E.A.A.A., an Egyptian citizen, an imam at the Islamic cultural association “La Pace” in San Donà. The Interior Ministry, in a note, reported that, from the ongoing investigations, the man had highlighted himself as “a follower of an Islamic religious orientation marked by Orthodox Salafism, attested to radical positions”. Not only that. Investigators found that the Egyptian was in contact with people, including people from other European states, “gravitating to Islamist circles and engaged in criminal conduct”. The note from the Interior Ministry concludes by specifying that the imam “openly revealed his extremist thinking during a prayer held at the Salafist mosque” al-Nur “in Berlin”. The other two expelled are from Como and Ravenna. Thus the exiles or expulsions carried out from 2015 to today rise to 489, of which 28 have been in 2020. In Venice, the group of Kosovars accused of wanting to carry out an attack caused a sensation: the four men, including a minor, were all convicted also on appeal.