Leader letter to have a major impact on Western youth: Scholar

Press TV has conducted an interview with Shabbir Hassanally, Islamic scholar from London, to ask for his take on an open letter recently issued by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei to the youth in Western countries.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Well, another letter in the wake of another terrorist attack on Paris. Again these are questions that are being raised about why the Leader chose to address the youth in the West directly for a second time in the form of a letter?

Hassanally: I think, first of all, the letter that Ayatollah Khamenei has written is profound and everyone should spend time to study it and reflect on it. It is a sort of letter which can be understood by someone even at the superficial layer, but also it has got a lot of depth to it, a lot of fathoms to it. So it is very important.

At the moment, you can see around the Western world that there is a lot of disenchantment and people, especially the youth, they sort of feel: “Why should I worry about these politics?”, “why should I be worry about these governments?” They do not listen. There was a demonstration yesterday in London against Mr. Cameron’s wanting to go down the route of Mr. Blair and start another war in the Middle East and start bombing Syria in some bizarre attempt to get rid of Daesh, which of course he funds through the Saudis. And you can see from the mood of a lot of people, I mean people who especially remember 2003 when there was almost a million people who demonstrated against the war in Iraq, but the politicians just ignored it.

So there is a lot of disenchantment and people are being given this idea through the Western media that all of these problems, all of this terrorism is somehow endemic to Islam and the fact that Muslims around the world have been saying ‘no, this is not the case, Islam is against all of this’ people do not listen. But when someone of strength and caliber of Imam Khamenei comes along and says that actually no, you need to think about, it is a lot more in depth; you need to understand where the responsibility for this terrorism lies; you need to go and so some investigations; you need to go and think; you need to look at the disparity between saying there is a ‘good terrorist’ and a ‘bad terrorist’ and not saying anything to the Zionists, but condemning anyone else.

Press TV: Indeed, Mr. Hassanally it is quite striking that in both of the letters, the leader has appealed to the nature of asking questions of the youth and told them to look for the answers themselves and not accept things that face value. Now as we go into the letter, the leader did speak of how Western interventionism is a big cause for what we are seeing in the form of Daesh, al-Qaeda, the Taliban today and the terrorism that is wreaking havoc both in the Muslim world and in the West. This does really bring in to question the West whole counter-terrorism policy now, doesn’t it?

Hassanally: Of course and I think a lot of people in the West; even though they won’t say it, I know certainly people who work at classes and stuff, they all feel very cynical about what the government is doing. You know when the government says we want to do this; we are doing this counter-terrorism blah blah blah blah blah, no one really believes them because if you think about it, they have achieved nothing. In Paris, you have far more surveillance than we have in England or in other parts of Europe and yet they are unable to capture these people before they did this horrific attack in Paris on Friday 13th, which is interesting in itself.   

So it seems to be that there is one sort of narrative for the public and another narrative which the public do not know about, but which is happening behind closed doors. A lot of people are saying that it seems like the West is somehow supporting these terrorist organizations; these are people who are not normally political. People like us, okay fine, we say this; this is something people normally expect from us, but when you have regular people who are not part of the “conspiracy crew,” when they are saying this; this is interesting.

And again, I cannot emphasize it enough, having a letter from someone like Ayatollah Khamenei who is a religious leader and who is a also the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran, saying and telling the youth “ask these questions, look at the reality, look at what is going, do not just accept what the media tells you, do not accept what a politician tells you, asks searching questions, ask difficult questions”, it really can start a sort of change in the mind of people. You know after the first letter there was a lot of impact. 

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