CAIRO – The top authority for the world’s Sunni Muslims, the imam of Al Azhar, yesterday condemned the wave of deadly terrorist attacks in the US as against the Islamic religion.

“To kill innocent men, women and children is a horrible and hideous act which no monotheistic religions approve of,” the imam, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, said in a statement to Egypt’s state-run news agency Mena.  

Governments and newspapers across the Middle East joined the chorus of condemnation of the attacks but urged Washington to resist the temptation to take rash revenge.  

Iraq, however, struck a sour note, and some Palestinians and Lebanese even celebrated Tuesday’s deadly attacks that reduced New York’s World Trade Center to a pile of rubble and set the Pentagon ablaze.  

Iraq said the attacks were the “fruit” of American crimes and a “lesson for all tyrants and oppressors”.  

A government statement read on Iraqi TV said that “the American cowboys are reaping the fruit of their crimes against humanity”.  

The Palestinian leadership, however, yesterday denied that Palestinians had celebrated the devastating strikes, echoing a statement by the leadership of the autonomous Palestinian town of Nablus in the West Bank that sought to downplay expressions of joy from its citizens. 

The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council representing Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world’s largest Islamic body strongly condemned as: barbaric and criminal the attacks on the US.