Posted on 09/15/2002 12:35:43 PM PDT by HAL9000
LONDON, Sept 15 (AFP) - The unfolding crisis over Iraq is an opportunity for Muslims to sweep away corrupt regimes throughout the Muslim world, the British representative of the Islamic Hizb ul-Tahrir (Liberation Party) said Sunday.Though Hizb ul-Tahrir opposes war on Iraq, it hopes the crisis will be the spark that leads to the creation of a new Islamic "khilafah," or caliphate, Imran Waheed told journalists.
"We see all the Muslim rulers remain silent, really, in essence, to America and Britain's war-mongering over Iraq," said Waheed, who helped to organize a important rally Sunday of several thousand Muslims in London.
"We call on the Muslims in the Muslim world to rise up and to remove their rulers and their regimes and to implement Islam," he said. "Certainly, this is an opportunity."
Sunday's all-day rally at the London Arena, in the Docklands financial district, was billed as the biggest gathering of Muslims in the West since the September 11 attacks last year.
Its theme was the role of Muslims in the West in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
Banned in many Muslim countries, Hizb ul-Tahrir rejects violence in favor of "political and intellectual" action with the goal of reviving the caliphate that disappeared with the Ottoman Empire after World War I.
It sees the unfolding crisis in the Middle East as foretelling a clash of civilizations driven by Anglo-Saxon capitalist interests.
"A lot of Muslims are going to die in this bombing of Iraq," said Sajjad Khan, another Hizb ul-Tahrir member.
"Of course, as concerned Muslims, we don't want anyone -- Muslims or non-Muslims -- to be victimized by the American colonialist agenda," Khan said.
"British soldiers and American soliders are going to die to fatten up the balance sheets of oil companies," he said. "At the end of the day, it's to feed a very few elite at the top."
Waheed said Iraq was today not an Islamic state, nor was its president Saddam Hussein an Islamic leader.
"But what we do not want to see in Iraq is America and Britain replacing Saddam Hussein with an Iraqi Hamid Karzai (the Afghan leader), a subservient and loyal puppet who will facilitate the harvesting of America's interests from the region, including the vast oil reserves of the Middle East," he said.
Organizers said almost 9,000 people attended Sunday's rally, paying five pounds (7.75 dollars, 8.20 euros) for admission to the cavernous venue that usually hosts hard-rock concerts and ice hockey games.
Speakers included Palestinian Imam Issam Amireh, a critic of Yasser Arafat; Iraqi dissident Abu Muhammad; and Moinuddin Ahmed, an Indian Muslim who witnessed the recent bloodshed in Gujarat state.
Founded in Jerusalem in 1953 by scholar Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, Hizb ut-Tahrir considers violence and armed struggle to be a violation of Islamic law.
Last month 26 of its members, three of them Britons, were charged in Egypt with belonging to an illegal organization, four months after they were arrested. Waheed has alleged that they have been tortured.
In October last year, Turkish police said they had arrested six suspected Hizb ut-Tahrir members for distributing leaflets protesting US air strikes in Afghanistan.
Amnesty International has meanwhile reported the arrests of party members in the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
OK, let's get cold fusion running.
You Arabs, f*** off and die.
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