BAGHDAD - A Sunni prayer leader urged Muslims to wage jihad, or holy war, to recover their usurped rights and called on US forces to speed up their withdrawal from Iraq. "Muslims are entitled to raise the banner of jihad to restore usurped rights or repel an evil threatening them," Sheikh Muayyed al-Aazami said Friday in his weekly sermon at the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad.
| They're always raising the banner of jihad. They've raised it so many times, so predictably, even they must be getting bored with it now. |
Iraqis "reject any form of occupation, oppression or hegemony," he said, adding that US forces should go home since they had "finished their job of eliminating the former regime which threatened America's security" by allegedly pursuing weapons of mass destruction. US troops "should leave our country and take the weapons of mass destruction if they find any because the people don't need them," the imam added. "Our people want to breathe. Don't weigh on them any longer because they suffered enough from occupation, tyranny, injustice and wars during the last century," Aazami said.
| "Let us Iraqis get on with telling our fellow Iraqis what to do, and killing them of they don't." |
The US-led occupation administration said on Thursday it would outlaw incitement to violence and was ready to enforce the ban even in mosques. The policy notice, which is to "go out fairly shortly," will prohibit incitement to "armed insurrection," including attacks on coalition troops, as well "racial and religious violence," an administration spokesman said. The ban is "targeted largely" at the burgeoning free press which has grown up here since the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime on April 9. But the spokesman said the coalition would consider "taking action" even in mosques if preachers abused the sermons given each Friday at the main weekly Muslim prayers.
| Until they publicly kick bastards like this one out of their mosques and then kill the people who bitch about it, the habit of trying to beard the Americans will keep spreading. If there's no penalty for thinking like a thug, there's no incentive not to. |
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