Times of India:

NEW DELHI: Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei raised eyebrows when he tweeted "Muslim world should openly support people of Bahrain, Kashmir, Yemen, etc and repudiate oppressors & tyrants who attacked people in Ramadan."

As part of his Eid address, the Ayatollah tried to bring together the global Islamic community by identifying common enemies — in this case Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Arabs as well as India. Khamenei also tried to revive the old Muslim versus Jew divide by bringing up the Palestine issue as the reason for a full fledged Islamic jihad against Israel.

"Palestine is the first important issue of the Muslim world. According to the Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence), when an enemy dominates Muslim lands, Jihad is the duty of all, in any form possible. Today, the fight against the Zionist regime is obligatory for the Muslim world. Why do some abandon this job?"

His question is interesting, because in the Middle East political cauldron, the old Arab versus Israel battle no longer holds. For that matter, the Palestine cause has flagged in recent times, as the Islamic world has found itself convulsed in revolutions and extremist Islamist groups wreaking havoc from Iraq and Libya to Afghanistan and beyond.

Iran is part of the big sectarian war currently under way in the Middle East, which explains Khamenei's reference to Yemen and Bahrain — these are territories Iran would like to bring within its sphere of influence and where they are engaged in a bitter battle with Saudi Arabia-led alliance...

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