The latest episode of the anti-Muslim campaign was an article published October 2 in U.S. newspaper, the Washington Times, by two members of a Jewish organization who used the events of 9/11 as a tool to attack Muslim scholars accusing them of preaching hate and of terrorizing Arab and Muslim moderates into staying silent.

The two writers are connected to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish organization. Abraham Cooper is the associate dean of the organization, and Harold Brackman is a historical consultant to the center.

Although the two authors of the article admitted that the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches and dozens of Protestant and Orthodox religious leaders stand firmly against U.S. President George Bush’s war threats to Iraq and that they exhorted world countries not to bow to American pressures to join hands in the campaign against Iraq “under the pretext of the war on terrorism,” they branded Muslim religious scholars who oppose the war on Iraq as “preachers of hate.”

The two writers also accused moderate Muslim scholars as being silent because of fear. “A year after September 11 and on the eve of probable war with Iraq, the silence among moderate Muslims is ominous. The bottom line is that ordinary Arabs and Muslims have no voice. Millions of them oppose violence and abhor terrorism, but remain silent in the face of intimidation and death.”

“The silence of the moderates is as striking in supposedly friendly Egypt and Saudi Arabia as it is in Syria and Iran. Indeed, in these nations, respected Muslim religious leaders routinely fan the flames of hatred,” they charged.

Ignoring Islamic rulings that respect the freedom of belief expression, they claimed that the reason for this silence is that “dissent in the Muslim world is dangerous. Most moderates have long since been cowed into silence by their radical brethren. They hide their opinions for their own good, while radical religious leaders preach hate and stifle dissent.”

“From Baghdad to Khartoum and Karachi and from Algeria to Afghanistan, the extremists who hold sway brook little dissent,” they charged.

However, in reality, Islam advocates the principles of freedom, including freedom of religion, thought, and expression. Islam rejected forcing people to believe even in its message.

Trying to cast doubts on the clear-cut positions of major moderate Islamic scholars, Brackman and Cooper tried to water down condemnations of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

In a statement issued in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaradawi had said: “Our hearts bleed for the attacks that has targeted the World Trade Center [WTC], as well as other institutions in the United States despite our strong oppositions to the American biased policy towards Israel on the military, political and economic fronts.

“Islam, the religion of tolerance, holds the human soul in high esteem, and considers the attack against innocent human beings as a grave sin,” he maintained.

Al-Qaradawi also asserted that killing hundreds of helpless civilians who have nothing to do with the decision-making process and are striving hard to earn their daily bread, such as the victims of the attacks, is considered a heinous crime in Islam.

He slammed Al-Qaeda over claiming responsibility of the synagogue explosion on the Tunisian island of Djerba in April 2002 that killed 19 people, including 14 German tourists and said that it is not permissible in Islam to do so.

Interviewed by IslamOnline, Al-Qaradawi said Islam prohibits attacks on places of worship such as churches and synagogues or attacks on men of religion, even in the state of war.

“Civilians, such as the German tourists, should not be killed, or kept as hostages. Jews, not in conflict with Muslims, must not be killed as well. Anyone who commits these crimes is punishable by Islamic Sharia and have committed the sin of killing a soul that Allah has prohibited to kill and of spreading corruption on earth,” said Al-Qaradawi.

Al-Qaradawi also denounced the kidnapping and killings of civilians and foreigners by the Abu Sayyaf militia in the Philippines.

Commenting on such crimes, Al-Qaradawi said it is shameful to commit such acts in the name of the Islamic faith, saying that such acts produce backlashes against Islam and Muslims worldwide.

The veteran Muslim scholar also led a delegation of top Islamic scholars to Afghanistan in a bid to broker a solution for the standoff between Taliban leader Mullah Mohamed Omar and the world community over the demolition of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage, including two massive Buddha statues.

Al-Qaradawi even issued a fatwa (religious ruling) that Afghanistan’s statues are not idols, and thus would not threaten Muslim beliefs or contradict Islamic doctrine.

“The demolition of these statues will harm the image of Islam and will provoke the anger of the international community, especially Buddhists who number 300 million,” Al-Qaradawi said.

Brackman and Cooper continued to list propagated allegations of Christians being forced to convert to Islam in Indonesia, non-Muslims being killed and enslaved in Sudan and churches being put afire in Pakistan, ignoring all political intricacies and tribal politics present in these countries.

They failed to mention, however, anti-Muslim campaigns on the rampage in the United States. They did not mention unwarranted arrest campaigns targeting American Muslims just for being Arabs or Muslims.

They also failed to mention the anti-Muslim pogroms that racked the Indian state of Gujarat earlier this year - a pogrom in which 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindu fanatics, and up to 100,000 forced out of their homes and into refugee camps.

However, al-Tayeb has declared resistance fighters should not target civilians or children in their resistance to the Israeli occupation.

On October 4, the Defense for Children International and the Early Childhood Resource Center said that the vast majority of Palestinian children killed during the uprising against Israeli occupation that broke out two years ago died in places where they should have been safe.

The two human rights groups gave a figure of 350 children killed and another 7,000 wounded.

On the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict, Al-Qaradawi told Al-Jazeera satellite TV channel on May 2, 2002, that he was against Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and holy shrines. “We do not fight Israelis because they are Jews, but because they took our land, killed our children and profaned our holy places,” he said.

“The battle is a battle of land, rather than one of belief,” Al-Qaradawi said.

Brackman and Cooper also attacked Sheikh Aaed ben Maqbul al-Qurni, saying that he endorses “the use of nuclear weapons against the enemies of Islam.”

They said that he “recently argued, for example, that Arabs must reject the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because there can be “no agreement with (heretics) concerning the prohibition of such weapons, [unless] either they become Muslims . . . or accept the reign of Islam . . . or a battle with whatever weapons are allowed by Islamic law.” In other words, he invokes Islamic tradition to urge Muslim governments to acquire and deploy weapons of mass destruction against Israel and other “enemies of Islam.””