Islam and New Zealand Muslim community - Israel occupation worse than Nazis â€” Saudi envoy

LONDON (R) â€” Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain said on Tuesday that Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was worse than anything Europe experienced under Nazi Germany.He also defended Palestinian suicide bombers.

Ghazi Algosaibi, who drew fire last April for writing a poem in praise of an 18-year-old female suicide bomber, said Israel was using its military might against civilians who were defending themselves with the only weapons available to them.

â€œThis is a war of occupation, far more severe than anything the Germans did when they occupied Europe in World War II,â€ he told academics and reporters after giving a speech at the University of Westminster in London.

The Nazis systematically exterminated six million Jews during World War II when Germany occupied much of continental Europe.

He said that contrary to the wide portrayal of Palestinian suicide bombers as religious fanatics seeking promised heavenly rewards, most were driven by their desperate circumstances under Israeli occupation.

â€œThe man who kills himself does it because he has decided it is better to die than to live as a slave,â€ he said.

He said the poorly equipped Palestinians were using everything they had to oppose the might of the Israeli army, considered the strongest in the Middle East.

â€œIf nothing is at their disposal they will use their bodies.â€

Saudi Arabia has put forward a peace initiative, backed by the United States, offering Israel normal ties with Arab states in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

The oil-rich kingdom is a key US ally in the Gulf but ties have been strained since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, with some American parliamentarians accusing Riyadh of not doing enough to combat groups the United States has labelled â€œterrorists.â€

Washington blames Al Qaeda for the Sept. 11 attacks and says 15 of the 19 people who slammed hijacked planes into New York's World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in Washington were Saudis.

Algosaibi said Saudi Arabia was doing everything in its power to fight groups assailed as â€œterroristâ€, including Saudi-born militant Osama Ben Laden's Al Qaeda network, which he said did not have a strong power base in the kingdom.

â€œI honestly think for logistical reasons... it is difficult for Ben Laden to have active cells in Saudi Arabia,â€ he said.

â€œOsama Ben Laden is the only Saudi at the top of the organisation. Saying Al Qaeda is a Saudi invention is confusing the acts of a single person with a state.â€