Russia's religious organizations have always consolidated to deal with common challenges during the most difficult for the country periods, and now we can also see this process, when there is a common threat of terrorism, the Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council, Ilyas Umakhanov, said, speaking with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza on the sidelines of the international conference titled 'Religion against terrorism', organized by the People's Friendship University and the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Russia.
"I believe that all the religious organizations consolidate against both common challenges and threats in difficult periods of the country's development. And the fact that representatives of all the confessions, which were represented at the conference at a very authoritative level, spoke with a common position is another visual confirmation," he said.
"Of course, it is also due to the fact that terrorism is a global threat, and only together we can cope with it," the deputy chairman of the upper house of parliament stressed.
According to Umakhanov, such common work should be carried out by representatives of legislative bodies as well. "And for this reason in the near future we will hold a major international parliamentary conference in St. Petersburg , a parliamentary forum on combating terrorism," the politician said.
The parliamentarian said during his speech at the conference that against this background actions of the West in the Middle East can not but cause concern, because in fact they are only playing in the fight against terrorism, without worrying about number of victims.
"We are frankly worried that lately our Western partners not only don't support our initiative, but also destroy pre-existing joint formats of fighting terrorism. The frankly cynical and hypocritical approach of the US to the implementation of agreements with Russia on joint actions against terrorists in Syria is perturbing," he stressed.
In addition, the deputy chairman of the Federation Council recalled that ISIL is currently carrying out the large-scale and coordinated work to intimidate religious leaders and heads of religious organizations, in order to force them to refrain from stating a clear position condemning ISIL and other terrorist organizations. "Religious leaders with positions of tough confrontation terrorist elements must feel the public's support and receive protection from the state," Umahanov stressed.
"Given the increase of terrorist threat we could think about preparing a document to consolidate a common approach to the issues in confronting fanatics, extremists and terrorists of all kinds. For example, it might be an anti-terrorist charter of world religions," the MP suggested.
