US media is reporting that Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood leader Tariq Al-Suwaidan has been removed as head of the Al-Resalah TV channel by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal who says Al-Suwaidan has admitted being a leader in the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood. According to a Reuters report:
Tariq Al-Suwaidan
RIYADH, August 18, 2013 — Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has fired a renowned Kuwaiti preacher and motivational speaker from the top job at the religious television channel he owns for what he described as “extremist inclinations” and links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Saudi Arabia has come out strongly in support of an army crackdown on the Brotherhood in Egypt following the military overthrow of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi last month. The Brotherhood’s rise had unsettled Gulf Arab states which feared it would embolden Islamists at home.
The prince said Tareq al-Suwaidan, who has more than 1.9 million Twitter followers and is known across the Arab world for his lectures on self-improvement from an Islamic perspective, had identified himself as “one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood” during a lecture in Yemen.
“There is no place for those who carry any deviant thoughts at Al Resalah Channel,” Alwaleed wrote in a letter to Suwaidan, according to a news release from the prince’s office.
Prince Alwaleed (picture) said in the letter that he had repeatedly warned Suwaidan against political affiliation.
Suwaidan responded on Twitter, “Only the weak worry about earning a living, and no one abandons his principles but he who cares about earthly matters.”
Prince Alwaleed’s uncle, King Abdullah, on Friday called on Arabs to stand together against “attempts to destabilise” Egypt, in a message of support for the military leadership.
Tariq Al-Suwidan is one of the most important leaders of the Kuwait Brotherhood as well as the General Manager of Al-Resalah Satellite TV, the brainchild of Saudi businessman Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. In May 2007, Al-Suwaidan was listed by federal prosecutors in a group of U.S Muslim Brotherhood members named as part of a large group of Unindicted Co-Conspirators in the terrorism financing case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, convicted of providing funds for Hamas. Al-Suwaidan is also the author of the anti-Semitic “Encyclopedia of Jews.” A previous post discussed both his background and the struggle to control his Wikipedia page. Another post discussed an interview with Al-Suwaidan in which he called on the Islamic nation to provide “direct support to the armed resistance” against Israel as well as urging Islamic youth to undertake “electronic Jihad” in order to destroy Israeli websites. In March 2012, Al-Suwaidan gave a TV interview in which he made various anti-Semitic comments and said that the most dangerous thing facing Muslims is not dictatorships but Jews whom he calls “the greatest enemy.”
In January 2009, we reported on the struggle for control over Al-Suwaidan’s Wikipedia page.
In June 2012, MEMRI published a profile of Al- Suwaidan detailing some of his extremist views.
Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal is a Saudi Arabian businessman and investor and a member of the Saudi royal family. He is the founder, CEO, and 95% owner of the Kingdom Holding Company which describes itself as a diversified investment company, whose main interests are banking / financial services, real estate, hotels, media, entertainment, and internet / technology. In March 2013, Forbes listed Al Waleed as the 26th-richest man in the world, with an estimated net worth of US $20 Billion. In 2011, Prince Talal bought a $300 million dollar stake in Twitter, the social-media giant and he has partnered with the Bloomberg news service to establish a new Arabic language news channel expected to launch in 2014. Prince Talal is known to have made donations to both the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), both part of the US Muslim Brotherhood. He is also a known to have been a major supporter of the Georgetown University Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CCMU), run by long-time apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood Dr. John Esposito and the Center is actually known as the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. In 2008 we reported that Prince Talal had made numerous financial contributions to a pan-Islamic interfaith dialog organization that is closely tied to the global Muslim Brotherhood and which has an antisemitic statement posted on its website. Our predecessor publication also reported in 2008 that Prince Talal was one of the sponsors of a conference held by the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists (WCMP), a new international Islamic philanthropic organization with strong Muslim Brotherhood representation.
