Press TV has conducted an interview with Shabbir Hassanaly, an activist and Islamic scholar, in that regard.
Press TV: I would like to get your first reactions to the statement made by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.
Hassanaly: I think the foreign minister has hit the nail on the head, to be honest, when he says that the Saudi family have taken Islamic sites hostage in order to fuel sectarianism and to serve the interests of global Zionism.
You could not put any better than that. That is exactly what this little family have been doing for a very long time. They initially might have started without having Zionism in their ally list, if you like, but as of late they have become slaves of global Zionism completely and they are usurping the money that they have, they are usurping the rights of their population and for some reason that does not make any sense.
The Western regimes such as London, Washington, all of these people who scream about human rights and all the time by sanctions on other countries that they think are not observing human rights support this entity, this little family that in reality they do not even know how to spell “human rights”. They do not even know how to spell “human”. They consider everyone as serfs, people who just, if you like, are there to serve their interests and the way that they have manipulated the Islamic sites is despicable and proof of this, if anyone ever needed proof of how the Saudi regime has usurped the Islamic sites is what happened last year in Mina. The way, the sort of Teflon approach that they took where they refused to even entertain any discussion about it, it echoes a lot of self-inflicted terror attacks, if you like. If you look at 9/11 there has never been any real investigation into it that is honest, if you look at 7/7 over here the same situation, if you look at what happened in Mina, the Saudi regime is actively blocking any sort of investigation and earlier on Ayatollah Khamenei had also said very clearly that the Saudis need to be forced, that regime needs to be forced to have an international committee investigate the event in Mina and the whole of the Hajj, the whole of the holy sites in what can only be called occupied Arabia needs to be managed by an international body of Muslims not just by a little family …
Press TV: From the other side of the aisle, there is criticism that is being leveled against Iran saying Iran is the one that is politicizing the issue. What would you say to that?
Hassanaly: The question is how is Iran politicizing the issue? When you have a country whose population have been targeted by the regime of occupying Arabia, is it not fair for Iran to turn around and say, ‘excuse me we want an investigation on this, we want this to be discussed’ and it should also be pointed out given the nature of the Saudi regime and the way it does Takfir, with the way it willy-nilly decides that a certain group is not Muslim, a certain group is Muslim, this is a very strange scenario when you have a place that this regime occupies which is the holy land for all Muslims regardless of the domination, you cannot have a group running it which declares a portion of the Muslims as heretic. This is invalid, the whole premise is insane and the only other place where we have this sort of premise is obviously occupied Palestine.
So sadly like I have said before all of the holy places for Muslims - Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem - are certainly occupied by Zionists and we pray that they are liberated soon.