TIMES ONLINE: The Iranian Supreme Leader’s representative in Britain has told Muslim servicemen and women to quit the Armed Forces, saying that their involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is forbidden by Islam.
The cleric, personally appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to be his special envoy to the UK, also urged Muslims to defeat the opposition to the Iranian regime and keep the 30-year-old Islamic Republic alive.
In his first interview with an English language newspaper, Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi, director of the Islamic Centre of England, said he regretted that protesters were killed by the Iranian security forces after the presidential election in June but that their deaths were “unavoidable”.
Ayatollah Moezi, the most senior Iranian spiritual leader in Britain with thousands of followers from the Shia sect, said that it was wrong for followers of Islam to serve in the Armed Forces, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq where Muslims were being killed.
“Not only do I not accept it for Muslims to go there, I don’t accept non-Muslims to go there as well,” Ayatollah Moezi told The Times through an interpreter provided by him. “We say that Muslims are not allowed to go and kill Muslims. Do you think that Christians are allowed to go and kill Muslims?” >>> Richard Kerbaj | Saturday, November 14, 2009
TIMES ONLINE: Anyone who counts Ayatollah Abdolhossein Moezi as a spiritual leader is unlikely to have joined the British military in the first place. He is the religious envoy of the same regime that calls Britain “the little Satan”.
Ayatollah Moezi is the director of the Islamic Centre of England, the London outpost of Iran’s neoconservative regime — a role to which he was personally appointed by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His leadership — as political as it is religious — is anathema to most British-Iranians, the majority of whom came to the country to escape the Islamic Revolution.
Shia Muslims, who traditionally take their spiritual guidance from imams such as Ayatollah Khamenei, are outnumbered in Britain by Sunni Muslims, mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, who do not all recognise any special priestly authority. >>> Catherine Philp, Diplomatic Correspondent | Saturday, November 14, 2009
