Al-Jazeera Airs Archival Footage Of Recently-Deceased Muslim Brotherhood Spiritual Leader Yusuf Al-Qaradawi Defending His Own Support For Suicide Bombings, Praising Qatar For Supporting Him

On September 29, 2022, Al-Jazeera Network (Qatar) aired a show honoring Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who had died three days earlier. The show featured excerpts from interviews in which Al-Qaradawi had praised Qatar for its role in spreading his teachings and defended his expressions of support for "martyrdom operations". In the latter excerpt, Al-Qaradawi explained that in legitimate "martyrdom operations", people use their bodies to defend their country from occupiers, and he elaborated that this had not been the case in the 9/11 attacks, in which the attackers had used passenger planes to "invade" and attack the United States. For more about Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and for more about his support for suicide operations, see MEMRI TV Clips Nos. 45, 822, 1093, 1691, 2731, 2394, and 5760.

Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi: "Several years ago, Qatar television began airing my Friday sermons, and when Qatar Television became a satellite channel, the whole world would listen to my sermons. Since the launch of Qatar Television, I have had a weekly program on it. It is called 'The Guidance of Islam.' I would like to congratulate all the viewers in general, and Qatar in particular, for this satellite channel [Al-Jazeera TV] which is launching from beloved Qatar. This channel gives expression to our hopes, our values, and our beliefs.

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"Some journalists — [Thomas] Friedman and others — have spoken to me, here in Qatar. The Americans asked me whether by permitting martyrdom operations, I was also permitting what had happened on 9/11. I said: No, this is completely different. The target is different and the means are different. In martyrdom operations, people want to defend their country [and they target] the occupiers, but [on 9/11], nobody was defending his country. They just invaded another country. In addition, the means are different. In a martyrdom operation, a person is using his own body to fight his enemy. [On 9/11], they used four commercial planes filled with passengers who had been guilty of nothing, and who had nothing to do with war or politics. They were used as missiles. They had not given permission to be sacrificed. Both the means and the target were illegitimate."