Qur’an desecrators must be punished: Hezbollah leader
The leader of Hezbollah, one of Lebanon’s Shia resistance movements, said Saturday that if governments of Muslim-majority nations do not act against countries that allow the desecration of the Qur’an, Muslims should “punish” those who facilitate attacks on Islam’s holy book.
The comments by Hassan Nasrallah came in a video address to tens of thousands gathered in Beirut’s southern suburbs to mark Ashoura, a Shia holy day commemorating the seventh-century martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Imam Hussein (PBUH), AP wrote.
Nasrallah slammed recent incidents in which the Qur’an was burned or otherwise desecrated at authorized demonstrations in Sweden and Denmark.
He said Muslims should watch for the outcome of an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, scheduled to take place in Baghdad on Monday to discuss the organization’s response to the Qur’an burnings.
The organization and its member states should “send a firm, decisive and unequivocal message to these governments that any repeat of the attacks will be met with a boycott,” Nasrallah said. If they do not, he said, Muslim youth should “punish the desecrators”.
He did not elaborate on what such a boycott and punishment should entail.