Leading Muslim scholars will meet in Doha on May 10-11 to discuss the starving of the Palestinian people after the cut in international aid, and are expected to issue a fatwa obliging Muslims and governments to help. “In view of the financial siege clamped on the Palestinian people, it is the duty of Muslim scholars to meet and make their position known to the nation,” prominent scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi told a press conference on Saturday, May 6. Sheikh Qaradawi slammed “the West’s double standards in rejecting the Palestinian democracy simply because its result did not suit them.” He branded this as “political hypocrisy which we reject.”
Palestine Chronicle, 8 May 2006
And while we’re on the subject, an earlier appeal by Qaradawi for financial support to the Palestinians was attacked by the pseudo-left neocons at Harry’s Place, who used excerpts selected by MEMRI from a Qaradawi sermon to accuse him, yet again, of being an anti-semite. “Gene” wrote:
“Maybe Sullivan, Ken Livingstone, Madeleine Bunting and other leftwing Qaradawi apologists still think that when he says ‘Jews’, he simply means Israelis. (I don’t think they really believe that, but let’s pretend they do.) How, then, will they explain away this passage from Qaradawi’s latest sermon, broadcast April 21 on Qatar TV? ‘The Jews throughout the world – despite their well-known stinginess, miserliness, and selfishness, and despite their worship of gold…. The Jews contributed generously to the Jewish state, before and after its establishment, and they are still contributing to this day. Shouldn’t the Arabs and Muslims contribute for their sacred cause?’ Here, inconveniently, Qaradawi refers unmistakably to stingy, miserly, selfish, gold-worshipping non-Israeli Jews. How will the Islamophobia Watchers spin this? Will they even try?”
I’ve asked an Arabic-speaking contact to check out the video extracts from Qaradawi’s sermon on the MEMRI site and he tells me that – surprise, surprise – the MEMRI translation is unreliable. The relevant passage should read something like this:
“The Palestinian people has sacrificed its blood. It has easily sacrificed its souls, for the sake of its cause, its religion, and its homeland. Should we not give them money? The Jews throughout the world – despite what is said about their stinginess, miserliness, selfishness and worship of gold… The Jews contributed generously to the Jewish state, before and after its establishment, and they are still contributing to this day. Shouldn’t the Arabs and Muslims contribute for their sacred cause?”
In other words, rather than saying that he himself thinks that all Jews are stingy, miserly, selfish etc, Qaradawi is saying that contrary to these supposed characteristics the world Jewish community has in fact been extremely generous in its support for the Israeli state, and that the world Muslim community should seek to emulate this generosity in supporting the Palestinians.
Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain analyses the BNP’s anti-Muslim campaign:
“For the BNP, Christian is just another word for white, just as Islamic has become another word for Asian. Now that the religious hatred bill has been watered down, groups like the BNP are free to use religious affiliation as code for race, translating illegal incitement to racial hatred into legal incitement to religious hatred…. what is so utterly ridiculous about the BNP’s desire to defend ‘Christian culture’ is that the vast majority of Christians in the world are not white. The average Anglican, for instance is a black woman living in Africa.”