1.Breit Bart(http://www.breitbart.com)
UN Accredits NGO Led by Anti-Semitic Former Malaysian PM, 5 August 2013
by Anne Bayefsky
The UN has awarded official accreditation to an NGO headed by the antisemitic former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. As its founder and President, Mohamad calls his personal project the “Perdana Global Peace Foundation.”
Apparently, the title’s reference to the word “peace” was enough to win over the members of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP). That’s the committee formed back in 1975 to implement the Zionism-is-racism resolution and still going strong.
Accreditation will come with UN perks like the ability to attend and participate in various UN meetings. For instance, when the Palestinians upgraded their status at last year’s General Assembly, the CEIRPP stacked the visitor seats with supporters who dutifully stood up in front of the television cameras and cheered.
Strictly-speaking, the UN rule for accrediting NGOs is adherence to the UN Charter. The Charter preaches "respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”
Mahathir Mohamad, by contrast, has a long history of being for discrimination on the basis of race and religion.
As far back as September 1986, he gave a speech at a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement, in which he stated: "the expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land 2,000 years ago and the Nazi oppression of Jews have taught them nothing. If anything at all, it has transformed the Jews into the very monsters that they condemn so roundly in their propaganda material. They have been apt pupils of the late Dr. Goebbels."
Today, his anti-Semitic (anti-American and anti-Israel) diatribes continue unabated on his "chedet" blog - conveniently available directly from the website of the newly-accredited Perdana Global Peace Foundation.
Here are just a few of his entries:
• September 14th, 2012: “I am glad to be labelled anti-Semitic. How can I be otherwise when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies."
• October 18, 2012: "the most blatant example of control over public expression is with regard to the protection of the Jews... when [Holocaust denier] David Irving a British historian doubted the 6 million figure, he was arrested and jailed in Austria even though his opinion was not expressed in that country. Since then no one has dared to openly question the veracity of the claim on the number of Jews killed by the Nazis."
• November 21th, 2012: "Israel is really operating an Auschwitz type of concentration camps as operated by the Nazis for Jews in the last war. Israel tells the world that the Nazis were inhuman. But the Palestinians, the Gazans did not put Jews in concentration camps. Still they are being made to apparently pay for the sins of the Europeans. Humane treatment is only for Jews. If Jews treat the Arabs with the same kind of brutality, it is alright."
• January 11, 2013: "AIPAC (the Jewish lobby) the most powerful lobby in the U.S..."
Mohamad is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist - much like the UN's other famous anti-Semite and "human rights expert," Richard Falk.
He penned a 9/11 rant, entitled "9/11 Revisted - Seeking the Truth,” as recently as November 20th, 2012. The entry begins by congratulating the Perdana Global Peace Foundation for "doing the unthinkable. It is going to seek the truth about the destruction of the twin World Trade Centre buildings..." He then claims Arabs are inferior and therefore incapable of masterminding 9/11: "They are not a disciplined people and this lack of discipline shows everywhere...The attacks on 9/11 involved very complex elements which needed detailed planning, precise timings and disciplined execution."
Mohamad continues, "I can imagine trained operatives like those in the CIA or Mossad planning and executing this complex operation but I cannot imagine an Arab like Osama bin Laden planning and directing this sophisticated aerial attack from some remote place in Afghanistan..." He then concludes: "Find the beneficiaries and I believe you will find the real terrorists."
There is not much doubt why the UN's CEIRPP Committee found the Perdana Global Peace Foundation to be just the kind of group with which it can do business; it's time for American taxpayers to take their business elsewhere.
2.American Thinker (http://www.americanthinker.com)
Duke Prof's Recipe for Restoring Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, 5 September 2013
by Cinnamon Stillwell
Beware Middle East studies professors offering advice. In the wake of the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) ouster from Egypt's presidency, South African-born Duke University Islamic studies professor Ebrahim Moosa has joined South Africa's ambassador to the United States Ebrahim Rasool to co-author a Washington Post op-ed advising Egypt to adopt a "multi-pronged strategy" overseen by "an internationally constituted group of eminent persons" to avoid civil war.
The authors recommend that the MB and "leaders from countries trusted by the Muslim Brotherhood" be included in this "group of eminent persons," which ignores both the popular rebellion that threw the Islamist party out of office, and the anti-democratic, despotic measures that sparked its downfall. In other words, it's a recipe for the restoration and strengthening of the Brotherhood.
The proposal has been met with a resounding no from Egypt, particularly the suggestion that Nobel Peace Prize winner and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town Desmond Tutu be included. The Egyptian foreign ministry issued a sharply-worded statement expressing its surprise that South Africa was "trying to export its failed reconciliation process that hasn't achieved real co-existence" and noting that the nation has "some of the highest rates of crime, corruption, poverty, unemployment, and poor health in the world."
Tutu is among the most celebrated supporters of the Boycott,Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement based on his unsubstantiated insistence that Israel, as his native South Africa once was, is an apartheid state. Along with Middle East studies scholars Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University and Lawrence Davidson of West Chester University, he is an "Honorary Advisory Board Member" for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel, the supposedly "non-violent" campaign that has resulted in a proliferation of death threats targeting entertainers planning to perform in Israel. Tutu's allegiance to the BDS movement obviously wasn't a barrier to his inclusion for Moosa, who in 2012 encouraged the U.S. to disregard the alleged predations of the "pro-Israel lobby" and engage with the terrorist group-turned-government Hamas.
Others recommended by Moosa and Rasool include Tunisia's Ennahda Party leader Rachid Ghannouchi, who despite being falsely characterized-particularly by Georgetown University's John Esposito and Harvard University's Noah Feldman-as a "moderate Islamist" is in fact a pro-terrorist, anti-Israel radical; former Irish president Mary Robinson, who as chairwoman of the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, oversaw an orgy of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American hate (and upon whom President Obama bestowed a Medal of Freedom in 2009); and the rabid anti-Semite, "reformed" holocaust denier, 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.
It's no surprise that Moosa would promote the inclusion of Islamists in this "group of eminent persons": he has been an apologist for their ilk for many years, going so far in 2010 as to dismiss valid concerns about Saudi funding and Wahhabi influence in higher education with the ludicrous claim, "Wahabism is like the Baptists; it's kind of a denomination of sorts that started out in Saudi Arabia." He also defended Deobandism, the madrassa-based radical ideology that inspires the Taliban, at a 2011 workshop at the University of California, Berkeley. When asked about the nature of Sharia (Islamic) law during one of series of 2010 video interviews, he obfuscated, claiming nonsensically that it's "not necessarily a correct impression that in Shariah religion and state have been interwoven." After 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney selected as a special adviser on the Middle East and North Africa anti-Islamist Walid Phares, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, Moosa objected on the baseless grounds that Phares "is hostile to Muslims."
Moosa opined in a December, 2012 Council on Foreign Relations interview that "the continued oppression of political Islam" will only lead to radicalism, while allowing such parties to participate will necessarily result in "moderation." He extended this naiveté to the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, claiming that:
The more that political Islam becomes successful in the region, à la what's happened with the AKP in Turkey, the more the pressure will be applied on more radical groups like Hamas to moderate their own ideology. . . . [T]he path for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will be clear.
Most tellingly, when asked about the specter of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, Moosa concluded, "If there really is a lesson to be learned from Iran, it's not that political Islam necessarily leads to theocracy."
Moosa, whose views typify the wishful thinking and apologetics endemic to the field of Middle East studies, has demonstrated his unworthiness of the confidence bestowed upon him by policy makers, the media, students, and the general public. Fortunately, Egypt's interim government did not take Moosa's advice and rely upon the "expertise" of Islamists, Israel-haters, anti-Semites, and conspiracy theorists on how to run their country.
・Cinnamon Stillwell wrote this article for the Middle East Forum. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.
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