Clerics Calls For End To US Occupation/pacific, and anti-Jewish/Boston Globe/jihadunspun/Jun 02

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Clerics Calls For End To US Occupation
Jun 02, 2003
Source: The Boston Globe

A leading Shi'ite cleric urged Iraqi Muslims yesterday to oppose the US occupation and asserted that the United Nations had no right to legitimize the control of Iraq by the United States and the allied countries that overthrew Saddam Hussein.

Speaking to some 10,000 fervent worshipers at prayers on the Muslim Sabbath, Sheikh Kadhim Abadi also strongly discouraged the use of violence to end the occupation or to suppress practices abhorred by religious Muslims, such as drinking alcohol and viewing obscene pictures. "We demand that the American forces get out of Iraq," Abadi said beneath a broiling sun in front of the Al Mohsin mosque, in Baghdad's worst slum. He asserted that Americans would never tolerate occupation of their own land. "The Iraqi people have the right to run their own country."

Other Muslim clerics also denounced the American presence, in particular in the town of Fallujah, a former Hussein stronghold where US troops have repeatedly clashed with local militants. The comments by the clerics, whom Iraqis have turned to for leadership since Hussein's ouster, reflected the challenges US forces face in winning over the hearts and minds of the people.

Abadi's dramatic sermon was by turns strident, pacific, and anti-Jewish, as he warned that Jews were trying to buy up property in Baghdad and would one day attempt to evict the Muslims.

There is to date no evidence of foreigners of any kind buying property in the Iraqi capital, where unsettled conditions on the streets and paralysis in the legal system make it impossible to acquire valid title to houses or land.
He appealed to "people of humanity" in the United States to oppose the occupation, saying that "we are not your enemy. Your enemy is gone, as you can see." In a statement with ominous overtones for the US effort here, he asserted that "the sin of the occupation is greater than the endowment of liberty."

Worshipers at Al Mohsin, the principal mosque of the slum formerly known as Saddam City -- now renamed Sadr City, after a Muslim cleric assassinated by the Hussein regime -- roared their approval as Abadi accused the US-led coalition of deliberately making daily life difficult, then arranging for the lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq, "in order to make us forget about this occupation." But, he insisted, "we cannot be bought for gold."

He urged believers to struggle peacefully against the occupation and against trends toward more-open consumption of alcohol and displays of provocative pictures of women, but warned them not to use violent means. "You should not kill the Ba'athists," he said, referring to members of Hussein's political party. "You should not take the property of the people of Saddam. This is private property. It is forbidden to take it.. . . I am warning people not to kill, not to torture."
A top Sunni Muslim cleric in Fallujah, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, said US forces should depart now or they could face an uprising by former members of the Iraqi army.
"The hearts of the people of Fallujah are boiling with anger, and their anger grows bigger every day," Jamal Shakir Mahmoud Al Rifai, told worshipers at the packed Grand Mosque, according to Reuters.

Abadi vehemently enjoined people not to participate in the buying and selling of houses and apartments that he said has become rampant in Baghdad and other cities, asserting that this plays into the hands of Jews who want to take over Iraq. "Lots of people are now coming and buying houses in Baghdad, people are selling land to the Jewsｲ who "are coming and buying land here, just like they did in Palestine," he said.

Abadi also warned the United States, its allies, and Iraqi advocates of secular society that devout Muslims, especially the Shi'ites, who comprise 60 percent of the population and were repressed by Hussein, now are as entitled to speak freely as anyone else. "Some people say that these speeches [by Shi'ite clerics] against drinking alcohol and all kinds of corruption are against freedom, that freedom is being able to buy what you want and to observe religion if you want," Abadi said. "This is the globalization they want to bring into our society."
But "if they are free to say that, we are free to say what we believe," he said. "If [a practice] is against the heavenly institution, if it is against human ethics, it is against freedom."