Now that US President George W Bush welcomes a dialogue with your goodself, you're uniquely placed to put before him the real issue of Palestinian self-determination, not on a never-never basis, but now, and not subject to Israeli president Ariel Sharon's terms of the discontinuance of violence; violence will cease until the Palestinians get their long-deserved national rights:

1) Self-determination, in the least, must include all of the West Bank and Gaza and not just a pathetic fragment, the fragment Ehud Barak offered;

2) It must mean that the settlements, a thorn in Palestinian society and themselves a provocation to any Palestinian, must be dismantled, so also the special roads for 'Jews only', which link those settlements;

3) Obviously, the water beneath the land cannot be excluded;

4) Palestinians must control their own borders and as such have the right to construct airports and ports as required;

5) East Jerusalem must become the capital of a Palestinian state with the religious rights of all three faiths and their rights of access to their respective shrines guaranteed by the United Nations, or unified Jerusalem should be internationalised, as per UN resolutions going back over 40 years, or become the shared capital of Palestine and Israel;

6) A reasonable portion of the Palestinian refugees must be allowed to return to what is now the state of Israel;

7) All refugees must be compensated for the loss of their properties.

What is called 'terrorism' is the desperation of people who have nothing to lose. Israel has its tanks and American F-16s, while Palestinians have little more than their bodies with which to assail them. Only when Bush can be brought to really understand that Israel's oppression is in fact the oppression of the US on the Palestinian people and is the burning issue for all the ummah, can he ever hope for a cessation of 'terrorism'.

Secondly, the horrendous sanctions on Iraq, which have killed about half a million children, must immediately be uplifted. Bush must be made to understand that it is absolutely immoral for him to count the Americans dead at the World Trade Center and Pentagon - approximately half of the 5,000-6,000 people involved - while totally disregarding the death of those innocent.

Thirdly, it would behove the US to withdraw all of its troops from Saudi lands.

While we have very little hope of the US turning around its basic policy, we are nevertheless confident that you are the only Muslim leader who can put these demands squarely in front of Bush, and then it's up to him to choose: to give justice to the Palestinians and Iraqis or to bear the unremitting animosity of the world-wide ummah.