KUALA LUMPUR, 5 November — The head of Saudi Arabia’s biggest conglomerate has accused the West of pursuing a policy of double standard on Iraq and Israel, adding his voice to a growing chorus of criticism from the Kingdom.
Saleh Kamel, whose Dallah Albarakah Group (DBG) plans a media push to explain Islam to the West following a series of attacks blamed on Islamists, told Reuters a US-led strike on Iraq would fuel anti-American sentiment among Muslims.
“There are two different standards,” the chairman of the group with $8 billion in assets from banking to agriculture said in an interview on Sunday. He said 99 percent of the Muslims did not like Saddam but that did not mean they endorsed Western action to disarm him for allegedly having weapons of mass destruction.
“If we know that Israel has many bombs, no one says anything,” Kamel said. Israeli deaths, which Muslims opposed, were big news in the West but, he said, Palestinian deaths were not seen the same way. “When thousands of Palestinians are killed, or children killed by soldiers, we don’t hear the same feeling. Are those people not humans?”
The Kingdom, in its strongest rejection yet of US President George W. Bush’s policy of regime change in Iraq, said on Sunday it would not allow the US to launch an attack on Baghdad from Saudi soil. Anti-US sentiment is on the rise in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states over pro-Israeli US bias but Kamel said he was also worried by anti-Muslim bias in the West in the wake of the Sept.11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Kamel, who founded the Arab world’s first private TV channel and owns 20 radio and TV stations, is behind a proposed $100 million media blitz in the US and Europe to counter anti-Islam and anti-Arab publicity. The projects, which include setting up of a news agency and two TV channels as well as a public relations drive, will be launched early next year, said the business magnate, whose interests reach across 43 countries.
“Islam is completely misunderstood in the West,” he said. “The West knows about Islam only through the bad example of terrorism... There is no media that convey our message across to the West... One of the projects will be a free-to-air TV channel in English aimed at non-Muslims.
“We don’t want to compete with CNN or BBC. We will produce news and they can use our news if they wish,” Kamel said.
The second TV channel would be aimed at non-Arab Muslims to explain “real Islam”, he said.
“Islam does not allow people to kill. I would think the terrorists (involved in Sept. 11) were not real Muslims.”
Kamel said DBG was in talks with Arab and non-Arab investors to back the media projects with $100 million in capital. No government funding would be permitted. (R)
