“Islam with its principles and values has become a target that is mixed with terrorism in a lot of Western circles.” Yet again, for the umpteenth time, we see Islamic spokesmen blithely ignore how Islamic jihadists use “Islam with its principles and values” to explain and justify their terrorist acts. They continue to push the Big Lie that Islam is associated with terrorism because of Western analysts. “PUIC delegates condemn the West’s Islamophobia,” by Kareem Shaheen for The National, January 19:
ABU DHABI // Delegates at a major Islamic summit here condemned sectarian violence in Muslim countries and the Islamophobia that it says is plaguing the West.
They also called for the immediate lifting of economic sanctions on Islamic countries, including Iran, and accused the Israeli Mossad of orchestrating the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.
“It is essential to work on halting the tide of Islamophobia,” Abdulaziz al Ghurair, the speaker of the UAE Federal National Council and head of the executive committee of the Parliamentary Union of OIC member countries (PUIC), said yesterday.
“Islam with its principles and values has become a target that is mixed with terrorism in a lot of Western circles,” he said….
Mr al Ghurair said that Western attempts to interfere in the Muslim world under the guise of protecting the region’s Christians were “a natural extension of Islamophobia”, a result of a “lack of Western trust and knowledge of the tolerant reality of Islam”.
His comments came amid a concerted campaign in the Muslim world to respond forcefully to bombings that targeted Coptic Christians on New Year’s Eve in Alexandria. A suicide bomber killed 21 worshippers and injured scores of others in the Egyptian coastal city.
The union “strongly condemns the growing tide of hatred towards religions”, including the “bombing of mosques [and] churches”, stressing that places of worship must be protected and dubbing as “criminal” the bombing of the Egyptian church, according to the resolutions.
It rejected what it called politically motivated attempts to equate Islam with terrorism, while condemning sectarian violence in the Muslim world.
One of the resolutions denounced the labelling of Islamic countries as state sponsors of terrorism for supporting the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon, statements that seem aimed at deflecting criticism towards Iranian support for Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia.
The session also featured what appeared to be a veiled criticism of France’s ban on burqas.
“The manifestations of Islamophobia in Europe are taking on an institutional, and sometimes legislative, quality which warns of widespread violations of the rights of Muslims,” Mr al Ghurair said….
For example, the council called on the international community to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Though most Muslim countries agree that Israel’s nuclear arsenal should be dealt with, many Gulf countries express concern about Iran’s nuclear programme and have called on the Islamic Republic to open its nuclear facilities to the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
One of the PUIC’s resolutions stated that the union “strongly rejects the principle of imposing any kind of sanctions, whether unilateral or multilateral, on any Islamic state”, in addition to demanding “their immediate lifting”….