Sheikh Isa Qassim: Arab Regimes Are Helping to Set Their Own Region Alight
Bahrain's senior Shia cleric says states that know the plans against them are nonetheless fuelling conflicts and dressing them up as sectarian disputes
Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim, the leader of Bahrain’s Shia community, has accused a number of Arab and Muslim governments of serving US and Israeli efforts to deepen divisions across the region.
Speaking on Sunday about recent regional developments and the condition of the Muslim Ummah, Sheikh Qassim criticised what he described as the subservience of several Arab and Muslim states to Washington and Tel Aviv.
‘A poisonous culture of division’
“It is no secret to any of the regimes in the Arab and Muslim world that the United States and the Zionist regime have sinister and conspiratorial positions, agendas, and plans,” he said. “We are witnessing a poisonous culture of division being promoted through their media with the aim of dismantling the unity of the Muslim Ummah.”
That approach, he argued, is designed “to deepen divisions among official regimes at the regional and national levels, with an intense focus on religious and sectarian dimensions in order to create the most severe forms of discord and to perpetuate the creation of problems and the outbreak of destructive and incendiary conflicts.”
Substantial financial resources are being devoted to these plans, the cleric said, with the aim of fuelling conflicts that drain the resources of Arab and Muslim nations and threaten their shared existence.
‘They take pleasure in seeing it burn’
His sharpest criticism was reserved for the governments he says are aware of the design and take part in it regardless. A significant number of regional states, he argued, help foment conflicts and civil wars while presenting them as disputes rooted in sectarian or religious difference.
Their conduct, he said, amounts to a willingness to watch the Arab and Muslim world consume itself. “They take pleasure in seeing the Arab-Islamic world burn,” he said, “and their eyes will not be satisfied until the Arab and Islamic peoples become like humiliated slaves, submitting to the will of American hegemony and tyranny and that of the usurping Zionist regime.”
Reference: PressTv