An ex-cop charged with butchering a Brooklyn jogger in the street was a regular at a radical mosque whose imam preaches jihad against Jews and war on the American government — and that mosque has been collecting taxpayer money while doing it.
Sayed Mohassib, 29, was arrested November 7 for allegedly stabbing 28-year-old Katie Suarez to death while she was out for a run. A neighbor told the New York Post she routinely saw Mohassib praying at the Muslim American Society Youth Center in Bath Beach. “I see him go to pray, I see him work in the school,” the 54-year-old neighbor said.
In a 2014 Facebook post, Mohassib praised Shafiq G. Majdalawieh — who sits on the MAS Board of Trustees, per his LinkedIn — writing: “Great speech on leadership by my man shafiq! May Allah bless you with plenty hasanat!”
The mosque’s director, Imam Mohammad Badawy, 36, has delivered sermons that would get any Christian pastor visited by federal agents. According to recordings from the Middle East Media Research Institute, Badawy has preached a Hadith calling for Muslims to fight and kill Jews at the end of the world: “The last hour won’t come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them so Jews would hide behind rocks and trees. Then the rocks and tree would call: oh Muslim, oh servant of God! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
In a December 2024 sermon, Badawy defended that passage explicitly. According to the Post, he said critics who call the religion “insane” or say “Islam approved of a Holocaust” have the “bloodiest hands” and are “on the side of evil.” He framed the Hadith as “the final showdown between good and evil.”
In January, Badawy declared it his life’s mission to oppose the U.S. government, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Army.
Here is the part the press will bury: MAS has collected over $350,000 in taxpayer funding. At a January “Save Sudan” event, the mosque hosted vendors hawking trinkets glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all designated terrorist organizations.
Mohassib pleaded not guilty to all charges when indicted by a grand jury Tuesday. Badawy and Majdalawieh did not respond to the Post’s requests for comment.
The pattern is familiar. A house of worship incubates an ideology that names Jews as targets and the American government as an enemy. One of its congregants acts on that worldview in the streets of Brooklyn. And the institutional press will call it a lone wolf — because naming the ideology would mean confronting the fact that public money is subsidizing it.
The open question is not whether Mohassib was “radicalized.” It is how many more like him are sitting in pews where imams preach slaughter, and why any of it is funded by the Americans those sermons target.
