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Houston Chronicle · 24 September 1969

CP-1969-009

Nasser Asks Moslem Aid From Sickbed

New York Times News Service, Rabat

Nasser Asks Moslem Aid From Sickbed — Houston Chronicle, 24 September 1969
Houston Chronicle · 24 September 1969

Transcribed from the clipping

“Rabat — An absent President Nasser dominated the opening ceremony of the first Islamic Summit Conference with a message from his sickbed calling on all Moslem states to back the Arabs against ‘zionism and racism backed by imperialism.’ The message Monday was read to representatives of 25 Islamic states by Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian leader’s personal representative. Sadat said that the fire at the Al Aksa Mosque was premeditated and was one aspect of ‘the threat to all free peoples.’ News raced through the hall as the participants were gathering that Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and head of the Fatah commandos, had arrived… A member of Fatah said he had received a personal invitation from King Hassan after the PLO had intimated that it would publicize the fact that no representative of the Palestinian people had been invited… While Syria said it would not attend because it had no diplomatic relations with Morocco, Iraq at the last minute sent word it had sent no representative because the organizers could not guarantee to give the Palestine Liberation Organization an opportunity to present its fighting program. Alluding to the ‘catastrophy’ of the Al Aksa fire, King Hassan called on Moslems everywhere to ‘expunge this shame’ by unified action. No Moslem, he asserted, could forget ‘our brethren suffering in tents’ — the Palestinian refugees.”

Context added by this archive

A head of state pairs the two words at the first Islamic Summit, six years before the vote, and an American paper prints it with a lower-case z. The summit was called after the Al Aqsa fire of August 1969. Iraq stayed away because the organizers would not promise the PLO a hearing.

Cite this item

"Nasser Asks Moslem Aid From Sickbed," Houston Chronicle, 24 September 1969. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1969-009. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1969-009

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1969-009.

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