Jummah Khutba by MRN’s Executive Member Dr Firoz Osman
أَعُوذُ بِاللَهِ مِنَ الشِّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيم
بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Surah Munafiqun
63/2
اتَّخَذُوا أَيْمَانَهُمْ جُنَّةً فَصَدُّوا عَن سَبِيلِاللَّهِ إِنَّهُمْ سَاءَ مَا كَانُوا يَعْمَلُونَ
They (the hypocrites)have made their oaths a cover [for their falseness], and thus they turn others away from the Path of God. Evil indeed is all that they are wont to do:
Hypocrisy is defined as “ the assuming of a false appearance of virtue, of having a virtuous character, of being moral and principled.”.
It is often associated or equated with pretense or shame. It has existed in one form or another in all societies since time immemorial. There is not a single culture or religion, which condones hypocrisy. In fact, hypocrisy is one of those evils which every scripture condemns many times.
In the surah cited above, أَيْمَانَهُمْ oaths, could be interpreted in the context of contemporary international politics to mean the noble ideals of freedom and justice, and equality, which those who dominate the global system espouse but never observe, as the victims of the domination will readily testify.
The oaths could also mean their charters like the United Nations charter, their Constitutions, whether the American Constitution of fringe and international human rights declarations, such as the United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other conventions, eg. The Geneva Convention, which eulogize rights and liberties – rights and liberties which are rejected when it suits the interest of the powerful who control the international system.
In another verse of the Quran in surah Baqara, further exposes the hypocrisy of the present international order.
2/11
وَإِذَا قِيلَ لَهُمْ لَا تُفْسِدُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ قَالُوا إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ مُصْلِحُونَ
And when they are told, “Do not spread corruption on earth,” they answer, “We are but improving things!”/we only want to make peace.
This statement of “wanting to only make peace” is a mere smokescreen to conceal the wonton pursuit of pernicious goals, which only reinforced the dominance of the dominant.
كَبُرَ مَقْتًا عِندَ اللَّهِ أَن تَقُولُوا مَا لَا تَفْعَلُونَ
61 : 3 It is very hateful in the sight of Allâh that you should profess what you do not practise.
The Quran (Surah As-Saff, verse 3) states, “How despicable it is in the sight of Allah that you say what you do not do.” This verse condemns hypocrisy, emphasizing that sincere belief must be accompanied by sincere action. It highlights the importance of aligning words with deeds in the eyes of God.
The genocide in Gaza has exposed the lies and hypocrisy of the western countries, in particular America, Britain, France, Germany, and others. It also exposes the hypocrisy of those surrounding Palestine, the Arab and Muslim regimes propped up by the West, such as Egypt, Jordan, the Emirates, the Saudi, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
One must also include many of the ulema, including those from South Africa, that warmly welcome representatives from these despotic regimes that openly support the objectives of the Zionist entity known as Israel.
On the one hand, they raise their hands in dua and shed excessive tears for those victims in Gaza, and on the other hand, they accept funds from those who are supporting the murder of women and children that we have seen decimated day-in a day-out for the last 18 months.
But let me focus primarily on the Western world.
Many of us believe that The United States and the West stand up all over the world for democracy, free speech, a free press, free markets, the rule of law, and human rights.
This is what they tell us. They tell us that the West wants peace, equality and justice.
These are lies repeated ad nauseum to inoculate societies from thinking for themselves. Palestine, perhaps like no other crisis before it, has exposed this hypocrisy for what they are, mendacities of the highest order.
The events of October 7th starkly exposed these lies.
Let us briefly take each of these Western lies.
Some Muslims think that Democracy and shura is the same, interpreted from the Quranic Ayat:
وَالَّذِينَ اسْتَجَابُوا لِرَبِّهِمْ وَأَقَامُوا الصَّلَاةَ وَأَمْرُهُمْ شُورَىٰ بَيْنَهُمْ وَمِمَّا رَزَقْنَاهُمْ يُنفِقُونَ
42 : 38 And those who respond to their Lord and observe Prayer and whose affairs are (decided by) mutual consultation, and who go on spending (in Our cause) out of what We have provided for them,
This is not so.
Is democracy the best form of governing a country? Is it a system that the West thinks will bring about peace and harmony in the world?
The West claims it is the best political system so far evolved, albeit with flaws. Then why do the proponents of democracy overthrow free and fair elections in many parts of the world? They assassinated democratically elected leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Thomas Sankara of Burkino Faso, and have assassinated or are trying to kill popular leaders Ibrahim Traore, Mohammed Morsi and many, many others. They have engineered numerous coups over decades on every continent in the world.
In 2006, when Hamas was democratically elected to majority seats in the Palestinian Authority, the Western world, that sole purveyor of global democracy, collectively lost its mind and shouted “No! We didn’t mean democracy like that!”
Commentators noted that the US Congress quickly passed a law barring any aid to the Palestinian Authority unless it demonstrated “progress toward purging from its security services individuals with ties to terrorism, dismantling all terrorist infrastructure and cooperating with Israel’s security services, halting anti-American and anti-Israel incitement, and ensuring democracy and financial transparency.”
Likewise, the Middle East Quartet, composed of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation, stated, “A two-state solution to the conflict requires all participants in the democratic process to renounce violence and terror, accept Israel’s right to exist, and disarm.”
This of course applied only to the Palestinians. Israel could not be expected to renounce terror, accept Palestine’s right to exist, and disarm. Netanyahu’s Likud party platform specifically denies support for a Palestinian state.
Palestinians who resist the Zionist oppression and occupation are labeled “terrorists”.
This is the audacity of those who have colonized the whole world that are trying to convince the victims that resistance to colonialism is terrorism.
Western backed media propagate the democracies are the most civilized forms of government. They claim that Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle-East”, India the largest, Britain the oldest, America the strongest democracy; they tell us (with no regard for the fact that the worst autocracies in the Middle-East — Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt — receive billions of dollars from the U.S. every year), has supported an apartheid and genocidal Israeli regime against the Palestinians.
Israeli Apartheid.
The Palestinians of Israel do not have equal rights. The Adalah organization maintains a list of over 65 discriminatory laws against Palestinians.
Just to tabulated a few:
- The Nation-State Bill passed by the Israeli Knesset in 2018 expressly states that only Jews have the right to national self-determination within Israel.
- Palestinians in the occupied West Bank do not have freedom of movement between there and Gaza or inside Israel proper.
- Palestinians can be legally barred from living in Israeli villages.
- It is illegal for Palestinians to collect rainwater.
- Palestinians cannot get construction permits for their homes.
- They do not have the same marriage rights as Jewish Israelis. Any person who marries a Palestinian, regardless of their nationality, has their movements restricted within Israel and may even be prohibited from reentering the region.
- A Palestinian who marries a Jewish Israeli cannot be naturalized as Israeli. Some Palestinians who have managed to leave Israel are disallowed from ever returning.
- The aim of these citizenship laws are clear: maintaining Jewish supremacy at the expense of Palestinian rights. Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid admitted as such, syaing, “We shouldn’t hide the essence of the Citizenship Law. It’s one of the tools aimed at ensuring a Jewish majority in the State of Israel.”
Israel is, plainly, not a democratic state.
In the U.S., some citizens are trying to exercise their democratic right to boycott Israeli goods.
However, some U.S. states make you sign a loyalty oath to Israel if you want government contracts or government jobs, specifically barring any tactics used by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement (BDS) against Israel.
One recent example, the city of San Marcos, Texas, found that it was sending $4.4 million dollars to Israel every year. In response to the city council simply drafting a resolution to be voted upon which calls for shifting those funds towards domestic priorities, Texas governor Greg Abbott has threatened to remove San Marcos from all future state contracts.
That’s is American democracy at work — a (“conservative”) governor subverting localized control in favor of a foreign country.
Other examples of Western hypocrisy-
Algeria -the Islamic Salvation front won the primary election, and the election was then called off leading to a civil war.
The hugely popular democratically elected Pakistani leader Imran Khan of Pakistan languishes in prison after the American-backed Pakistani military engineered his ouster.
Egypt’s first ever democratically elected leader Mohammad Morsi was incarcerated and died in prison after a Western-backed coup d’etat installed General Sisi, aided and abetted by the Emirates, Saudis and Israel.
Free Speech
Journalists in the USA and writers have been arrested, harassed, assaulted, thrown into unmarked vans by plainclothes cops, surveilled, had their visas revoked, and deported for as little as writing editorials in favor of the Palestinian people.
Some argue that students forcibly occupying government and university buildings is an arrestable offense, fine, but proclaiming loudly that Palestinian people should not be annihilated by a murderous ethnonationalist Zionist state is not illegal, nor should it ever be.
In the U.K., which does not have a specific free speech protection like the U.S. does, a leading activist with Palestine Action has been arrested in charge with supporting a terrorist organization for two speeches that he gave. That’s all. He gave speeches.
With these draconian state tactics, we are returning to the days of WW1, when a nationwide witch hunt was carried out by the reactionary state and its deputized paramilitaries and police forces to utterly destroy anti-war and pro-labor activism. Offices were ransacked. Publications were shut down. Private mail was spied on. Thousands were imprisoned and hundreds were deported. That’s where we are again.
In Apartheid in SA newspapers such as the Rand Daily Mail and Vrye Weekblad were censored and their journalists hounded, fined and threatened.
Today, Western Journalists are literally being detained, interrogated, having their personal effects stolen, and charged with serious crimes. Some examples: Journalist Sarah Wilkinson was arrested in the UK., and had her devices stolen for “content that she has posted online” regarding Palestine.
Asa Winstanley, an associate editor for Electronic Intifada, was also arrested in the UK and had his devices stolen for “encouragement of terrorism.”
Journalist Kit Klarenberg was arrested by counter – terrorism officers in the UK and interrogated about his political views as was
Craig Murray, a journalist and former U.K. diplomat and had his devices stolen for his pro-Palestine activities.
Journalist Richard Medhurst has been arrested by both the UK and Austrian governments on separate occasions, both times having his journalistic property seized.
In Medhurst’s interrogation by Austrian cops, the officers literally emphasized the fact that Medhurst has a sizeable following and is therefore dangerously influential.
Writing about the killing of Nasrallah , or Ismail Haniya or Yahya Sinwar pose a danger to journalists .
It’s not just arrests. Everything that CNN and BBC reporters reported had to be screened by Israeli censors and those outlets complied. They complied. So much for a free press.
They do not want the truth to be known no foreign journalists are allowed into Israel In a recent interview on CNN Amanpour failed to extract that from Israeli deputy foreign minister for journalist to verify its claims were denied.
The Rule of Law
The United States — by continuing to fund and arm the Israelis even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order Israel to prevent the genocide of Palestinians — is a full partner in Israel’s genocide, and thus criminally responsible.
The USA has vetoed multiple resolutions at the U.N. Security Council for a ceasefire. In U.S. law it is forbidden to give military support to countries which impede humanitarian aid, and yet it has continued to give weapons to Israel despite it preventing food and other necessary aid supplies from entering Gaza.
More than this, every single dollar that the U.S. sends to Israel violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) because Israel is a nuclear-armed nation. A law passed by Congress in 1976 bars any aid to be given to nuclear-armed countries which have not signed the NPT.
Israel has not signed the NPT. The U.S. does not even officially acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons because to do so would mean to admit that the billions of dollars that is given to Israel every year is illegal.
As Palestinian-American writer Rami Khouri points out , the West consistently demonstrates its lawless capriciousness in regards to Middle Eastern affairs:
The difficulty with the Israelis and the American government, especially the State Department…is they don’t really have any ethical or legal point of moral reference. … Whatever they say goes. … International law, UN resolutions, treaties, genocide conventions, these things don’t mean anything to the American government or to the Israeli government in this situation in the Middle East. They might mean something to them with the Rohingya or with somebody else, but here in our situation these rules of law are not applicable.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other high-level Israeli politicians and military leaders for their crimes against the Palestinians. Despite this, not a single government which has hosted visits of these Israeli officials since the warrants have issued have followed their legal duty to arrest these criminals as signatories to the treaty that created the ICC. Instead, officials with the ICC and the ICJ, along with their family members, have been sanctioned by the U.S. and barred from travel.
This would not have been illegal. The 1958 Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act grants impunity for uniformed defenders of the Central State in ‘disturbed areas’, upheld by the Indian Supreme Court.
The Hind Rajab Foundation, a watchdog group, has been alerting governments when Israeli soldiers that clearly documented Israeli war crimes on social media are visiting their countries. None of these soldiers have faced criminal punishment despite ample evidence.
Edward Snowden, a whistleblower against criminal worldwide U.S. surveillance is certainly not a genocidaire, yet the U.S. revoked his passport and tried to extradite him from Hong Kong using legal documents that “did not fully comply” with the law.
Similarly, Julian Assange was forced to live in captivity for 14 years, between his time at the cramped Ecuadorian embassy in London and the high-security Belmarsh prison simply for reporting on leaked documents given to him by Chelsea Manning that showed widespread war crimes beyond what was thought previously possible. This is American rule of law. Whistleblowers and journalists are jailed and hounded to the ends of the earth. Mass-murderers walk around scot-free.
Human Rights
Unlike Islam, which embodies a concept of human rights that is holistic and integrated, the West has compartmentalized rights and worse in fact, is it emphasized one set of rights at the expense of another.
For example, the West emphasizes on political and civil rights, and it has given far more prominence than economic, social or cultural rights.
Islam instead emphasizes far more about our responsibilities, our relationships and our roles in society.
In the West, political rights such as elections and voting is important, irrespective of whether the party or the leader of the party is immoral and corrupt.
Also, there has been an over, emphasis on freedom of expression, movement, protest, in the right to worship. Other rights, such as economic rights, the right to employment, social rights, such as health clinic in hospitals or cultural and religious rights, like the right to worship or to your own language, to celebrate your festivals, has been diminishing in the West.
The West devastated Afghanistan saying that they will free women from oppression and bring about democracy. In Iraq they claimed to look for non-existent WMD and rid a dictator Saddam Hussein, and bring about peace and justice. In Libya they did the same to Khaddafi. All these countries still suffer from the toxic democratic poison of internecine strife and turmoil.
The propped up dictatorships and illegitimate monarchies in Egypt, Jordan, Emirates and Saudia are armed to the teeth to oppress their own people, lest they be overthrown or true democracy will bring in an Islamic government like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood leader Morsi who was democratically elected.
The struggle in many parts of the Muslim world by Resistance Movements is a struggle for freedom -to be ruled by a just system under Islam.
A decolonised entity in Palestine would be a major step in the decolonisation of the current world order itself and its liberation from US-led imperial power. And this is what the US, and the Western world dreads.
Zionists realized that in order to succeed in their colonial enterprise and maintain the support of the West, they would have to create an adversary common to both the West and the Jews. Only a Jewish state waging wars in the Middle East could “energize the West’s crusader mentality, its evangelical zeal, its dreams of end times, its imperial ambitions.”
Thus they have stoked rampant Islamophobia, propagating that Islam is a problem; that Muslims are terrorists; that they have failed to modernize; that they hate America for what it is, for its freedom, its progress and promise of democracy.
As much as the US and the Western needs the Apartheid Settler- Colonial Israel to stave off the West’s decline, the world, especially the Global South, needs a decolonised Palestine to hasten US and Western decline.
Palestine, not just metaphorically but literally, stands in the way of US and Western imperialism’s onward march towards continued global supremacy.
And there are signs that resistance against Western hegemony is growing.
In Africa, the Sahel states of Burkino Faso, Niger and Mali offer to the Muslim world a glimmer of hope that Islam is rising. Muslims are determined to unshackle the chains the West has bound them with.
The 10% of the White, Judeo-Christian empire is in decline. It has been a painful struggle, with more sacrifices required, but Allah swt success with sincere efforts.
A moment that reflected the courage of the new, young and brave African leadership and that reverberated across Africa’s political spectrum, Burkina Faso’s revolutionary leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, left South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (DA) Federal Chair Helen Zille visibly speechless during a high-profile pan-African summit. The confrontation occurred after Zille questioned the direction of certain West African states’ “anti-Western posture” and criticized their alignment with “non-democratic alliances.” This went viral on Facebook.
Zille, speaking on behalf of the DA in a forum that included African heads of state and regional leaders, urged greater cooperation with Western democracies, cautioning against what she called “a dangerous slide into populist militarism.” But she hadn’t even finished her remarks when Traoré took the microphone and delivered an unfiltered, impassioned response that silenced the room—and Zille.
“We will no longer be lectured by those who once imposed chains on our ancestors and now wish to dictate the terms of our freedom,” Traoré began, his voice firm and unwavering. “The DA may dress itself in liberal language, but we see through the tailored suits and polished accents. Africa is not a pupil. Africa is a rising voice—and we will speak for ourselves.”
Zille, known for her combative stance and ideological confidence, was reportedly taken aback by the directness of the response. Audience members described her expression as “frozen,” while others said she reached for her notes but didn’t speak again for the remainder of the session.
Traoré continued, turning his focus to what he labeled as “selective outrage” from political elites in the south of the continent.
“Where was your outrage,” he asked pointedly, “when our gold was plundered, our leaders assassinated, and our youth left to drown in the Mediterranean while the world watched? Now that we speak of sovereignty, we are called extremists? No, Madame Zille. We are reclaiming what was stolen—our land, our pride, and our power.”
The room erupted in applause, with several West and Central African leaders nodding in agreement. Even attendees who had remained neutral throughout the proceedings could not ignore the force and clarity of Traoré’s words.
Zille, facing growing criticism back home for what many see as the DA’s Eurocentric posture, has yet to issue a formal response. DA spokespersons described the moment as a “misunderstanding of context,” while some within her own party have quietly admitted that the exchange “did not land well.
Traoré’s bold stance is reflective of a broader movement sweeping across West Africa. From Mali to Niger and Burkina Faso, there’s a rising tide of anti-imperialist rhetoric and calls for a new, Africa-first political order. These leaders have openly rejected traditional alignments with former colonial pffdtddglk,jug owers, drawing inspiration from revolutionary icons like Thomas Sankara and Patrice Lumumba.
9/33
هُوَ الَّذِي أَرْسَلَ رَسُولَهُ بِالْهُدَىٰ وَدِينِ الْحَقِّ لِيُظْهِرَهُ gعَلَى الدِّينِ كُلِّهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْمُشْرِكُونَ
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