BAGHDAD, Iraq (FinalCall.com)�(Editor�s note: The following statement to the media was delivered July 7 by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan in Baghdad. The Nation of Islam leader visited Iraq as part of his current Peace Mission to the Middle East and Africa.)

AS-SALAAM ALAIKUM.

In The Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.

First, I would like to thank our hosts and various ministries for their reception of us. We met with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Oil, the Foreign Ministry, and the Vice President of Iraq His Excellency Tahar Yasin Ramadan. All of them gave us a very comprehensive understanding of the plight of the Iraqi people.

We found members of government to be in high spirit, despite the threats of imminent war. We saw the people going about their daily chores conducting their business, we saw much construction going on, despite the threat of imminent war.

From all of the administration officials we received the same statement: that they do not desire war. Their desire is peace, but they will defend themselves if they are attacked.

The purpose of our Peace Mission was to encourage the unity of Muslim leaders and the Muslim community so that they could speak with one voice to the American administration, appealing to President Bush and his nobler self to aid in the relief of the pain and misery of the Palestinian people, and that the Muslim community would speak with one voice against the war planned by the United States against Iraq.

We believe that President Bush is not getting the best advice in the decision that he made, reflected in his vision of peace for the Middle East. I had hoped that he would have made a statement that would give hope to the Palestinian people and lessen the hatred that exists in the Arab and Muslim world for the American administration.

Instead, the speech he made has only served to prove to the Arab and Muslim world that the United States cannot under his present administration be an honest broker for peace.

Therefore, the hatred for the American government and its policies��not for the American people��is not subsiding, but increasing. If the United States attacks Iraq, that hatred will only be worse and the cycle of violence that is now seen in acts that are called terrorist acts will only increase.

This is a delegation that stands against murder and war.  We believe we represent the vast majority of the American people. We also believe that if the American people really understood and knew the horror of the sanctions and what these sanctions have produced of suffering among the Iraqi people, that the American people would rise against such a policy and demand that these sanctions be lifted.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said �sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction.�  More than 1.6 million Iraqis have died since the end of the war in 1991.  At least 5,000 Iraqis are dying each month that these sanctions continue. 

We believe that the country of Iraq and the city of Baghdad should be held as sacred because Iraq is a cradle of civilization and is the birthplace of the Prophet Abraham, who was the Friend of God and the father of modern monotheistic belief, and the father of the three mainstreams of monotheism�Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

So we are asking President Bush and the Congress, appealing to the fairness of the American people, that before one American soldier should be put in harm�s way, or one bomb dropped on Iraq, that there should and there must be congressional hearings. That this proposed war be debated, and that those who desire war with Iraq, put before the American people the reasons that justify such action and allow the scholars and scientists who disagree with the Administration�s position to testify that the American people may hear both sides of this question, and then prevail upon our representatives in Congress to represent the will of the majority of the American people, and not the will of any lobby, no matter how strong that lobby may be.

It would be just and appropriate if the Congress of the United States would invite representatives of the Iraqi government to come before Congress of the United States and defend themselves and their position.

In closing, no nation, no matter how powerful it may be, can sustain its power if its evil outweighs its good and it exceeds the limits in the doing of injustice. There is a force in nature that God has placed in this universe that will move against an individual, a nation or a world when it exceeds the limit and becomes unjust in its behavior. Such was the case of Pharaoh. Such was the case of Rome and Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, Ancient Nineveh. We must not allow such to be the case for the greatest and only remaining superpower, the United States of America.

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Photos:
1-The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan talks to reporters in Baghdad July 7. Photo: AFP
2-An Iraqi mother kisses her child in the hospital. Photo: Kenneth Muhammad