ISLAMABAD, Feb 24: Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Maulana Fazlur Rehman on Friday accused the West of fomenting trouble in the whole world and said President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s government was siding with it at the cost of Pakistani people.

Addressing a rally in Islamabad organized by the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) as part of countrywide protests against blasphemous cartoons published in some European newspapers, he said the protest movement would continue till the West assured the Muslim world that ‘such satanic work’ would not be repeated.

Protest rallies were also held in Rawalpindi and other cities and towns across the country as a prelude to a nationwide general strike called by the MMA for March 3.

Maulana Fazl, who is also MMA’s secretary-general, was the main speaker at protest rallies of the day after the Punjab provincial government put alliance’s president Qazi Hussain Ahmed under house arrest in Lahore for the second time in a week.

Maulana Fazl accused America and its western partners of bullying Muslims and encouraging blasphemy against Islam in their countries.

He defended the opposition’s decision of not joining a proposed parliamentary delegation to Brussels to talk to European parliamentarians about the cartoon issue and said tear-gassing and baton-charging peaceful protesters and arrests of opposition leaders and workers showed the government was siding with the West at the cost of its own citizens.

He specifically targeted President Musharraf for aligning Pakistan with what he called ‘anti-Muslim forces’.

“America and the West are the enemies of Islam. These blasphemous drawings have exposed their actual face and proved that their so called war on terror was in fact a war against the Ummah,” he said.

The Maulana said that anti-Islam forces were playing with Muslim blood, joking with their sentiments and beliefs. “This is the worst terrorism,” he added.