AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): In this month of Ramadan, committed Muslims organize Quds rallies and peaceful processions to highlight the Zionists’ continued illegal occupation of al-Masjid al-Aqsa. In 1979, Imam Khomeini declared the last Friday of Ramadan as Quds Day and called upon Muslims worldwide to hold rallies. Since then the incarcerated leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky started organizing such rallies and protests to date.
Today Quds-Day rallies have become a global phenomenon. These rallies have become an important component of the committed Muslims’ struggle in Ramadan for truth and justice in a world dominated by oppression and illegality.
We call upon Muslims and other justice-loving people throughout the world to become part of this noble struggle. But why? Because Al-Quds — or Jerusalem — is at the very heart of Islam and the Muslim Ummah. Its status at any given time reflects the general health of the entire body of the Muslims. The parasites strike at the very heart whenever the historical situation makes it possible.
Secondly words can’t fully describe the despicable situation of Palestinians in occupied Palasetine. Just recently Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report affirming what we have for long been saying, that Israeli officials are committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution — crimes against humanity.
For more than a decade there had been an international convention that defined apartheid as a crime committed when officials systematically oppress one group in the territory under their control, and subject it to inhumane acts, with the intent to maintain the domination over that group for the benefit of another group. To bring real change, we need to call the situation what it is: an oppressive and discriminatory system that shows no signs of going away, and that meets the legal definition of apartheid.
The international community has for too long explained away and turned a blind eye to the increasingly transparent reality on the ground. Every day a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish.
The Islamic movement has a long way to go before the fruition of its struggle to free Palestine from the clutches of Zionism. Before then a number of States in the heartland of Islam will need to undergo a fundamental change such as Islamic Iran. Once the world of Islam has been restored to health, the Zionists will sue for peace, the west will send a fleet of ships and aircraft to evacuate the intruders from Palestine, and the US will offer to settle them all in one or more corners of its vast territory.
On a final note, as we march on today, we reiterate our demand for the past five difficult years, the release of our Leader, Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky, his wife and other Muslim brothers and sisters still languishing in jail since Zaria massacre by this Buhari regime in December, 2015. Shaikh Zakzaky is innocent as affirmed by a federal high court in Abuja since 2016 and should be allowed to go home as a free man.
SIGNED
SHEIKH ABDULHAMID BELLO ZARIA
07/05/2021
