DUBAI: It is being gulped down not just for its taste, but because it is a brew that mixes religion and politics. Across Europe and the Middle East, new soft drinks like Zam Zam-Cola, Mecca-Cola and Star-Cola are giving global brands like Coke and Pepsi the jitters.

Like Coca-Cola, the label of Mecca-Cola uses the red-and-white lettering, but the similarities end there. The 1.5-litre Mecca-Cola bottles are Palestinian green, with their labels printed in French as well as Arabic. “Not to be mixed with spirits,” reads the warning label.

Beyond that, the message on the bottles is almost a pamphlet. ”Ten per cent for Palestine” and “10 per cent for European charities” appear with a picture of Al Aqsa mosque in Al Quds.

Introduced in France by Tawfik Mathlouthi, the 46-year old founder of the leading Muslim-oriented station Radio Mediterranean, Mecca-Cola is being marketed and sold as a means of raising funds for Palestine — 10 per cent of the drink’s 1.20-euro price (1.14 US dollars) goes to the Palestinian cause. Selling 2.2 million bottles in just two months, Mecca-Cola is rated a success, particularly among the large urban Muslim communities in France and is set to make its debut in other European countries.

Mathlouthi, Franco-Tunisian entrepreneur who founded France’s Radio Mediterranean, was inspired to produce Mecca-Cola when he came across Iran’s Zam Zam-Cola, named after the holy spring at Makkah. Zam Zam-Cola and Star-Cola found a good market last year among Arab communities during a campaign to stay away from western products at the height of angry protests against US policies in the Middle East.

The US economy is “surviving on Arab money, which is used to supply the Israelis with monetary and military assistance to kill the Palestinians who are resisting the occupation for 50 years,” Nawal Jasim, head of the Women Students’ Union at the university, said in an interview.

“We are a billion Muslims and imagine how much the US economy would be affected if each of us boycott a soft drink can,” she said.That mood helped Zam Zam-Cola sell 10 million bottles in the Gulf countries between June and September and the sales of the UAE-based Star Cola shot up by 40 per cent during those months.

In producing a French derivative, Mathlouthi says he felt it was the best way to get across a message that he was already conveying quite successfully through his radio station. In May, he held a daylong pro-Palestinian “radiothon” that raised 300,000 US dollars for the Palestinian cause.

“I have now chosen to continue the work on behalf of Palestine on a full-time basis through manufacturing and distribution of Mecca Cola to other European markets”, perhaps Germany and Great Britain, and eventually back to Makkah in Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian territories,” he said in an interview this week in Dubai, where he intends to start Middle East operations.

Explaining the brand name, Mathlouthi said: “In these times where Islamophobia is so intense, it became evident to us that if we wanted to preserve our identity, we would have to come up with a name that would federate us, unite us and unify our efforts on behalf of Islam.”

“To drink Mecca-Cola is for us a concrete manifestation of our faith and of our solidarity on behalf of Islam and the Palestinian cause,” he pointed out, while building a profitable operation that eases human suffering. Mathlouthi is confident that in troubled times a politicised soft drink will sell in the heart of the Islamic world, adding that Saudi Arabia has already ordered five million 1.5-litre bottles. Several countries in the Middle East, including Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Jordan and Libya, are taking distribution rights, he added.

Claiming that his campaign is not anti-American and the drink not a competition for US drinks, Mathlouthi said each bottle sold is a protest against US President George W Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

But Hashem Orabi, a marketing manager with a private company in Dubai, says the new cola campaign represents a new attack on the US’s grip on fastfood outlets, soft drinks, leisure wear and cigarette brands, but was skeptical about how long they will last.

“Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most valuable brands. It’s not going to be put out of business easily. It has the wherewithal to neutralise the influence of the new brands,” he said. Moreover, Orabi said: “One can never be sure how long ideology will influence one’s tastes. If a Palestinian state is born, will the new brands still have the same appeal?”—Dawn/InterPress News Service