http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=1130#more-1130 A Medal for Brass:” Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s Chilling Fraudulent Ad in US Media
by Jerry Gordon, American Congress for Truth blog
When I received my copy of Business Week in the mail yesterday, I flipped through the pages until I found an ad that jarred my memory banks. Under a quotation about tolerance from the Qu’ran was a banner headline that blared:
Alwaleed Bin Talal Humanitarian Foundation, representing Kingdom Foundation, awarded the Pontifical Medal by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.
The ad has cross cut views of the Haj in Mecca and a pictutre of the Pope on the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Rome. There was a picture of King Abdullah with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, a picture of the Pontiff allegedly awarding the Pontifical Medal to H.E. Ms. Leila El Solh, Vice Chairiman of Alwaleed Bin Talal Humanitarian Foundation and across the way a picture of H.R.H Prince Alaweed Bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Foundation with the aforesaid Ms. El-Solh, who turns out to be his aunt.
Problem is there is no particular merit to the Pontifical Medal that can be purchased in the Vatican bookstore by anyone. My memory was jarred because of what Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute had told a number of us on a Victory Coalition conference call that it was a fraudulent ad and a ‘bit of a reach’ by Prince Alalweed bin Talal and his Humanitarian Foundation and the Saudi Royal family. The ad had also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post on May 8th
As Shea notes in this Weekly Standard article:
In the end, it was consultations with an independent expert on the Vatican and interviews with several recipients that solved the mystery: The medal shown in the ad is a common souvenir.
It is minted each year by the thousand and handed out as a memento to those granted an audience with the pope. All the staffers at the American embassy to the Holy See, for instance, have received it. It was given to White House officials when Pope Benedict met with Bush. It is for sale at the Vatican bookstore. It confers no honor at all.
Shea goes on to give us the nefarious purpose of this misleading ad:
In 2006, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, in a letter to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, quoted the king as referring to his government as the “Vatican of Islam.” The implication is that Saudi Arabia is not only hallowed ground as host of the two holiest Muslim sites, but also the arbiter of Islamic orthodoxy.
The recent ad directly supports this power play. It sets up visual parallels between the pope and the king, the Vatican and Mecca. A slogan at the bottom reads, “Two great faiths, Sharing one cause: humanity.” Using its control of the hajj and the vast wealth it pours into foreign evangelism, funding mosques, schools, libraries, and academic centers worldwide, the House of Saud is patiently pursuing its quest to make the Saudi variant of Islam–Wahhabism, with its warrant for the murder of heretics, apostates, and infidels–the Muslim norm. This is the ad’s chilling subtext.
The latest Saudi publicity stunt should not be dismissed as merely a boorish hoax. It offers a useful glimpse of the ambitions and methods of the Saudi state, which deserve to be taken seriously.
I wrote a letter to Business Week deploring the misleading ad. You can read my letter on the Shariah Finance Watch blog. I said to myself, this is pure taqiyya, the latest vestige of the Wahhabi PR campaign to seduce Westerners that there is no hate of the “other” in Islam. Really?
Posted by Jerry Gordon @ 9:26 pm |
Topic: Saudi/moslem taqiyah again (Read 1508 times)