A recent speaker in the Islam Online “Ramadan Tent” inside the Second Life virtual world is an exponent of conspiracy theories that place the blame for the Danish cartoon controversy on a “Zionist Project.” Fadel Suleiman, the director of the Kuwaiti Bridges Foundation, was the featured speaker in the latest of a series of “Live Fatwa” sessions presented in the Tent, described in recent posts as a joint project between the news portal owned by Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi and a virtual mosque that is part of Second Life. In 2006, Suleiman told Al-Ahram:
.. that sedition was meant to drive a wedge between Islamic countries and their two very best friends in Europe: Denmark and Norway. “Few people realise that people in Norway once collected signs to boycott Israeli products and that the Danish government used to give donations to Egypt and Palestine without any interest,” Suleiman said. Which, according to Suleiman, would support widespread conspiracy theories suggesting that a Zionist project to tarnish Islam and exclude Muslims was behind the cartoons.
Observers report that In his talk inside Second Life, conducted over live voice-chat, Suleiman verged on similar themes when discussing the recent appearance on a Minnesota college campus by Peter Hammond, a South African Christian minister known for his anti-Islamic views. Commenting on Hammond’s appearance, which he said was confronted by “The Brothers”, Suleiman stated that Hammond’s rhetoric about the Crusades was an example of “Crusade Denial” which he asserted should be given equal prominence with Holocaust denial due to its sensitivity on the part of Muslims. Following the talk, Suleiman provided his email address and website URL raising the issue of the possible dissemination of anti-Semitic ideas though this new medium.