Wake Up time for Muslims
Qaradawi urges withdrawal of peace initiative
Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi
Doha-based Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi yesterday urged the coming Arab League summit in Libya’s capital Tripoli to withdraw the Arab peace initiative and give the Israeli aggression on Jerusalem top priority on its agenda. The summit is scheduled for the end of this month.
In his Friday sermon, Sheikh Qaradawi slammed the Arab stance on the peace initiative, which was launched in 2002, saying that it had been proved that Israel was unwilling to return any land it had occupied.
“Israel would not give any thing in return for peace; It can only take,” Sheikh Qaradawi told a congregation at the Omar Bin al-Khattab Mosque at Khalifa South Town.
“What is strange is that the Arabs realise this, but still they are trying with Israel to accept the peace initiative,” he said.
“I appeal to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to withdraw the initiative. He launched it when he was a crown prince. Withdrawing the initiative is imperative now simply because neither Israel nor the US is bothered about it,” he maintained.
The peace initiative, which was unanimously approved by the Arab League summit in Beirut 2002, offered Israel full normalisation of relations if it withdrew from the Arab land occupied in 1967.
However, it was rejected by the Jewish state.
Qaradawi, who is the chairman of the International Union for Muslim Scholars (IUMS), also slammed what he called the Arab leaders’ “silence” over the recent Israeli aggressions on the Al Aqsa Mosque and the construction of the controversial Al Kharab synagogue.
“Arabs should take action and make the Jerusalem issue top of their agenda during the Tripoli summit. Although there are 1.6bn Muslims around the world, they did not move a finger over the daily Israeli aggression. It is as if Muslims had become slaves for Jews. Muslims are lacking a leadership, and regretfully their leaders are more interested in securing their seats of power,” he added.
The scholar urged Muslims around the world to be “on alert and be prepared for sacrificing their lives in defence of Jerusalem” if Israel continued its aggressions on the holy city”.
He said: “Israelis claimed rights to Jerusalem. They were there only for few hundred years before their existence came to an end. The Arabs were staying in the land of Palestine even before the Hebrew people migrated to it.”
Sheikh Qaradawi said the Jews had no right to claim Jerusalem. “Only in the early twentieth century, they began to infiltrate into the area until they totalled some thousands. When the Muslim conquest had reached Jerusalem, there were no Jews in the city. They were even banned to enter it by the Romans.”
He urged King Mohamed of Morocco, who is the head of the Jerusalem Committee under the Organisation of Islamic Conference, to call for a Muslim summit to tackle the Israeli threats to both the holy city and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
He criticised the ongoing Israeli settlement activity, saying that it was a “racial colonisation” which displaced the Palestinian people, replacing them with Jews, whom he said, were coming from America and Russia.
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