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Iran and Egypt Insist Those Resisting Occupation are not Terrorists
CAIRO, Sept 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Iran and Egypt "totally agree" that the use of double standards and equating people resisting occupation with terrorists is not the way to fight terrorism, the Iranian foreign minister said in Cairo Sunday, news agencies reported.
"We totally agree on the means to deal with terrorism and the roots of terrorism," Kamal Kharazi said after talks with his Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Maher, who also spoke of "total agreement".
"We must uproot it, and we must not have double standards regarding terrorism," Kharazi told reporters, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
"There must be a distinction between terrorism and the legitimate right of people to resist occupiers and occupation," he said.
"The Muslim world cannot close its eyes to terrorist actions led by Israel and cannot equate terrorism with attempts by people under occupation to recover their land," he added, referring to the plight of Palestinians who have been seeking to liberate their land from illegal Israeli occupation for decades.
Kharazi also said Sunday that Iran wants the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to take a "clear-cut" stand when they meet in Qatar this month to debate U.S. plans for an anti-terror coalition.
"I believe we have to come up with a very clear-cut communiqué to express our views as OIC members," Kharazi said after talks in Cairo with Amr Mussa, secretary general of the 22-member Arab League.
Kharazi is on the last leg of a tour of Arab states aimed at organizing the October 9th meeting of the OIC, the world's biggest grouping of Muslim nations, to discuss fallout from the September 11th attacks on the United States.
Egypt and non-Arab, but Muslim, Iran hold a similar line that the fight against terrorism following the hijacked plane bombings in New York and Washington should be led by the United Nations.
"We believe in an international cooperation under the auspices of the U.N., not a coalition that would be led by Americans," Kharazi told reporters.
Apart from talks with Amr Mussa, Kharazi, who flew in late Saturday, also met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher and Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the top cleric of al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's highest authority.
The OIC has condemned the attacks on the United States, which has left nearly 7,000 people dead, as "anathema to all human conventions and values".
But the prospect of retaliatory action against Afghanistan, a Muslim country whose own membership in the OIC has been left vacant, has divided OIC member states.
In particular, many of them have called on the United States to make public any evidence it has linking Saudi-born Osama bin Laden to the September 11th attacks.
Like other Muslim capitals, Cairo fears that Washington may target Palestinian resistance groups in its drive against terrorism and fail to push for a fair Israeli settlement with the Palestinians.
Two prominent OIC countries, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have cut diplomatic relations with Afghanistan's ruling Taliban since the start of the current crisis.
The Taliban, which has sheltered bin Laden since 1996, now only has diplomatic links with Pakistan.
A Gulf diplomat said Friday that Saudi Arabia had agreed to allow the United States to use state-of-the-art air command facilities in the kingdom for military action against bin Laden and the Taliban.
But Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz has said his country would not allow foreign troops to use its territory to launch attacks against Muslims and Arabs, a Saudi newspaper reported Sunday.
Egypt, meanwhile, tempered an earlier opposition to an eventual U.S.-led strike on Afghanistan without any concrete evidence against the culprits.
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