Ayatollah Khamenei told Muslim ambassadors and participants of an Islamic unity conference in Tehran Saturday that what is urgently needed is to form an Islamic ummah in order to unleash this inner power.
“What the Zionist regime is doing today and the crimes they commit without shame and concealment in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria, they literally are not fighting men, but people from all walks of the society in Palestine," he said.
“They were unable to deal a blow to men in Palestine, so they unleashed their ignorant and malicious anger on small children, on patients in hospitals, and on schools of young children," the Leader added.
“This is because we do not use our own inner power which we should. This internal power can remove and eliminate the Zionist regime, this evil cancerous tumor from the heart of the Islamic society, which is Palestine, and destroy the influence and dominance and bullying intervention of America in the region.”
Ayatollah Khamenei said the first step in the unity of the Islamic world is for the Islamic countries to completely cut off their economic relations with “this criminal and terrorist gang that rule Palestine and have usurped the land of Palestine”.
“This is the least they can do, and it must be done. They must destroy economic ties, weaken political ties, strengthen press and media attacks, and openly express and show that they are on the side of the oppressed Palestinian nation.”
Ayatollah Khamenei said the current situation and the domination of the enemies of Islam and the need felt by some Islamic countries for the support of the US is the result of divisions among Muslims.
“There are now many Islamic countries and about two billion Muslims living in the world, but you cannot call them ummah, because the ummah is a collection that moves towards a goal in harmony and with motivation, but we Muslims today are divided.
"If the Muslims were not divided, they could form a single group with the support and use of each other's facilities, which was more powerful than all the great powers, and they would no longer need to rely on America," he said.
With Islamic governments lacking strong motivation, the Leader said, it is the duty of the Islamic world's elite, namely politicians, scholars, scientists, academics, influential and intellectual classes, poets, writers, and political and social analysts to create this motivation in statesmen.
"If, for 10 years, the Islamic world’s press writes articles about Islamic unity, poets write poems, university professors analyze, and religious scholars issue rulings, the situation will change without a doubt, and with the awakening of the nations, their governments will also be forced to move in the direction they wish.”
Unity among Muslims, however, has bullheaded enemies who work to activate religious and sectarian faults as one of their most important hostile strategies to prevent the formation of the Islamic ummah, the Leader added.
More than 144 Shia and Sunni scholars from 36 countries participated in the 38th International Islamic Unity Conference held in Tehran on Thursday and Friday.
Ayatollah Khamenei said for the message of the conference to be sincerely heard, “we must act united within ourselves, and move towards real goals, and differences of opinion and taste should not affect the cooperation and solidarity of the ummah”.