Friday, July 27, 2007

Turkey: Islamists pay a price for victory

"Turkey: Islamists pay a price for victory
By M K Bhadrakumar

Nothing can quite surprise on the Middle East's political chessboard. This has been a week in which the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan visited Jerusalem jointly for the first time as envoys of the Arab League, and claimed they heard 'many positive responses' from the Israeli leadership.

Also diplomats from the United States and Iran discussed an unlikely alliance to fight Sunni insurgents in Iraq - provoking, in turn, a furious fatwa by Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi muftison their followers in Iraq to go and destroy the holy shrines of Imam Hussein and Hazrat-e-Abbas. Qom's venerable ayatollahs, Nasser Makarem Shirazi and Hossein Nouri Hamedani, promptly called on the United Nations to 'condemn such a fatwa, which fans the flames of international terrorism'."

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