LONDON, 1 February — Prince Alwaleed ibn Talal, a prominent Saudi businessman, has urged the world’s business community to address the economic factors that form a "breeding ground" for terrorist attacks. Prince Alwaleed also used the speech delivered late Wednesday to call on the international community to confront those who used religion for political aims.
His comments came in an address to Exeter University, southwest England, where he was awarded an honorary degree for his role in deepening understanding and practical cooperation between the Arab world and the West. Junior British Foreign Minister Ben Bradshaw, who was at the ceremony, described the prince’s speech as "visionary."
The 44-year-old prince, who has extensive business interests in the United States, said the world "cannot sit idly by and allow such incubators of fanaticism to hold sway".
He said the international business community and governments had to tackle the sense of "frustration, hopelessness, anger and despair that rise from ignorance, poverty, unemployment, neglect and repression, and above all the unfulfilled national political yearnings of the victimized around the globe."
Such economic factors form the "breeding ground for the dissemination of abominable ideas and the perpetration of terrorist acts," the prince argued.
Religion is used, he added, "to stir the masses in order to make the ultimate sacrifices for what were in fact political aims that were propagated as divine, transcendental goals.
"To counter such a threat, all of us in the international community — Muslim, Christian and Jew — have to join forces to expose the apostles of so-called religious, racial and ethnic purity, of jingoism, prejudice, bigotry, intolerance and xenophobia for what they are," the prince said.
