London Mayor Ken Livingstone's previous support of a Muslim cleric who advocates suicide bombings may cause him some embarrassment as he now must speak for the city in the wake of Thursday's terrorist bombings.
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Livingstone welcomed Al-Qaradawi to London's City Hall last year as an honored guest, and the mayor appeared in a video shown at a solidarity conference for the sheikh on Feb. 17 of this year in Doha, Qatar. Livingstone has publicly defended the sheikh against critics in the media and various grassroots organizations.
The Anti-Defamation League has labeled Al-Qaradawi the "Theologian of Terror," while the website GayEgypt.com has dubbed him the "Dr. Goebbels of modern Egypt," for Al-Qaradawi's anti-homosexual rhetoric.
Al-Qaradawi is a prominent member of the Muslim Brotherhood and his fatwas, or theological rulings are said to influence millions of followers who consider him an authoritative scholar on Islamic issues.
Those fatwas are widely distributed through IslamOnline.net, a website for which Al-Qaradawi serves as an advisor, and via a popular weekly religious program on the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, which the sheikh co-hosts.
Al-Qaradawi's theological justification for suicide bombings is entitled, "Hamas Operations Are Jihad and Those Who [Carry it Out and] Are Killed are Considered Martyrs" and appears on a website linked to the Hamas terror organization.
The Middle East Research Institute has translated Al-Qaradawi's sermons directed at the U.S. and United Kingdom. During one sermon, on March 7, 2003, delivered at the Umar Bin-al-Khattab mosque in Doha, Al-Qaradawi stated: "O God, destroy the Zionist, the American, and the British aggressors. O God, shake the ground under them and protect us from them."
Following Al-Qaradawi's arrival in London on July 7, 2004, BBC TV2 aired an interview in which he said Islam justifies suicide bombings in Iraq against the U.S. military and in Israel against women and children. That interview first appeared on the Doha, Qatar Television Service, was translated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and reported by the Middle East Research Institute.
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Al-Qaradawi ... stated, "You might arrest Bin Laden but a thousand Osama Bin Ladens will follow him. He is not a human being but a phenomenon of resistance of those oppressed by the stronger, by means they cannot even think about."
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Livingstone further defended Al-Qaradawi in an interview with the BBC. "When you get a progressive figure who [moves] that religion in the correct direction, you engage and you develop it," |
