JERUSALEM (AP) – A Muslim cleric who commandeered the stage at a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI to rail against Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians said Tuesday he spoke out because he was representing Islam.

Vatican officials criticized Sheik Taysir Tamimi’s five-minute speech Monday evening at what had been billed as an interfaith meeting. It was the first political controversy played out in Benedict’s presence on his five-day Holy Land pilgrimage.

Tamimi said organizers had not allotted him speaking time, though he was seated on the stage, and he simply righted a wrong by walking up to the podium to address the pope. A rabbi was also not scheduled to speak.

“I wanted to express the suffering of our people and to show the occupation’s procedures against the Palestinian people,” Tamimi told The Associated Press. “If I represent Islam at a meeting for dialogue and I don’t speak, am I just a piece of furniture?”

Tamimi is the head of the Jerusalem Islamic court, a senior religious position, and is a recognized leader among Palestinian Muslims.

Benedict has said he is here as a “pilgrim of peace,” and his stops have been carefully scripted. But he has not been able to avoid some pitfalls as Israelis and Palestinians clamor to present their narratives. In Israel, critics said the German-born pope has failed to express remorse for the Holocaust. The Palestinians want him to address their suffering under Israeli military rule.

Tamimi took the podium just before the last speaker of the evening was about to come up. Speaking in Arabic, he welcomed the pope to Jerusalem, “the eternal political, national and spiritual capital of Palestine.”

Benedict – who does not speak Arabic – was sitting in a white armchair on stage, alongside the Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal, Tamimi and Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, the chief rabbi of Haifa. Representatives of various religious groups sat in the audience, some wearing their regalia.

Dressed in a black robe and red cap with a white cloth around it, Tamimi said in Arabic that Muslims and Christians suffered together under the Israeli occupation and longed for a Palestinian state.

He accused Israel of confiscating Palestinian land to build Jewish settlements and preventing believers from reaching their holy sites. He said Israel’s separation barrier made the West Bank “a large prison.”

Israel began building the barrier, a combination of concrete walls, trenches and barbed wire, after a series of suicide bombings in Israel by West Bank Palestinians. But Palestinians object because the barrier’s route juts into the West Bank in many places.

Israel says the barrier is a meant to stop against attackers, but Palestinians maintain it’s a land grab.

Tamimi also criticized Israel’s recent Gaza offensive, which killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in three weeks.

“Your holiness, the pope, I call on you in the name of the one God to condemn these crimes and pressure the Israeli government to stop its aggression against the Palestinian people,” he said.

Another panelist tried three times to interrupt Tamimi, whose speech got scattered applause from some in the audience.

At the end, the cleric walked across the stage and shook Benedict’s hand.

The pope did not visibly react. Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, said the pope did not understand what Tamimi said.

Lombardi called his actions “a direct negation of what dialogue should be.”

“We hope that such incident will not damage the mission of the Holy Father aiming at promoting peace and interreligious dialogue as he has clearly affirmed in many occasions in this pilgrimage,” he said.

In his address, Benedict said differences should not divide believers, but “provide a wonderful opportunity for people of different religions to live together in profound respect, esteem and appreciation, encouraging one another in the ways of God.”

Oded Weiner, director-general of the Chief Rabbinate, said Tamimi’s speech showed the pope “how difficult the mission is that he has taken upon himself to advance reconciliation and dialogue in our region.”

AP-ES-05-12-09 1612EDT

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