The Strange case of Al Gore, Paul Wolfowitz and their joint defense of Malaysian Anti-Semite named Anwar Ibrahim

By Roy Thinnes

People in glass houses should not throw stones. Especially when they are a couple of discredited has-beens, one a former Democrat vice-president with an inconvenient truth about his marriage and divorce who has just escaped being charged with sexual assault; and the other a one-time neo-con who mightily embarrassed the Republican Party by getting himself fired from the World Bank over salary shenanigans involving his Libyan-born girlfriend Shaha Riza.

The fact is that Al Gore and Paul Wolfowitz have crossed the partisan divide to defend an anti-American, anti-Semitic foreign politician.

As if they did not create enough trouble for themselves, Al Gore and Paul Wolfowitz have now been brought together by a very strange friend. They recently penned a joint defense in The Wall Street Journal of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, a well-known anti-Semite and anti-American Muslim demagogue. Anwar is on trial for sodomy, a crime in Malaysia, but the real accusation is sexual assault, the intricacies of which Mr. Gore has had to read up on recently after narrowly escaping charges made by a masseuse in Portland, Oregon.

Anwar, the man Al Gore is defending, recently attacked the prime minister of his own country, a conservative and pragmatic ally of the United States in the war against terrorism, for joining the U.S. in imposing sanctions against the crazies in Tehran. And he attacked President Obama for not condemning Israel enough, calling him a weak president.

But it is Anwar’s line about how the Jews control everything, including the Government of Malaysia, that has raised alarm bells in Washington.

Anwar’s inflammatory rhetoric at home in Malaysia was so odious that it recently triggered a request from B’nai B’rith, the leading Jewish group, that the United States Government sever all ties with him.

In light of the role that Ibrahim has played in the resurgence of anti-Semitic polemics in Malaysian politics, wrote B’nai B’rith President Dennis Glick in a letter to House and Senate leaders two months ago, we ask that U.S. officials suspend their ties with Anwar Ibrahim. A purveyor of anti-Jewish hatred such as Ibrahim should not enjoy the measure of legitimacy that a positive relationship with the United States would confer upon him.

Both Al Gore and Paul Wolfowitz should have known better. Gore, in particular, is the bigger hypocrite, if only because he has cultivated a Mister Clean (or should we say Mister Green?) aura of self-aggrandizing perfection.

As for Wolfowitz, a recent whistle-blower’s report in Washington documented how his girlfriend Shaha Riza, was paid a salary higher than that of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice by a foundation set up with $20 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money. Riza’s activities in this role were in apparent violation of conflict of interest regulations at the World Bank, as well as the national security, tax and visa regulations of the U.S. government.

But even more egregiously Riza then helped get Anwar Ibrahim, a close friend of Wolfowitz, named as chairman of the obscure State Department-funded Foundation for the Future.

The Wall Street Journal article was not Wolfowitz’s first defense of Anwar Ibrahim. In 2009 he wrote an article promoting Anwar as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. And his reaction to the B’nai B’rith censure was to tell the Washington Post in June that Washington should cut [Anwar] some slack.

The complete absence of any mention of Anwar’s anti-Semitism or anti-American rhetoric in the Gore-Wolfowitz article is astonishing.

Gore and Wolfowitz behave as though Anwar is Nelson Mandela, rather than an opportunist whom conservative commentator Marco Vicenzino, in The Daily Caller, recently called another Chalabi and a chameleon who is expert at the art of deceiving D.C.

But one thing seems accurate. Gore and Wolfowitz wrote in the article that: Our views have been formed completely independently of each other.Well, that much is true because Anwar and his network of friends, media advisers and lobbyists in Washington have been working overtime to try and limit the damage caused by his recent series of anti-American and anti-Semitic rants. They even dispatched Anwar on a recent apology tour of Washington, trying to gloss over his militant Muslim rhetoric.

So the question emerges: When Al Gore and Paul Wolfowitz unite for the first time in history to defend a discredited Malaysian firebrand, are they ignorant and snookered, or just venal?

Former US diplomat, now lobbyist, close to Anwar,

becomes daily defender and late night blogger

By Roy Thinnes

John Malott is an eminent man: the former United States Ambassador to Malaysia has maintained his involvement in Asian affairs, from helming the Japan-America Society of Washington, D.C., to working with the lobbyists at the Washington consultancy Manatt Jones, to writing articles on the internal politics of the country in which he served as Ambassador. It is in the last capacity that Malott is of interest here. He has, lately, taken to popping up wherever the trial of Anwar Ibrahim is discussed. This ranges from pieces in the Wall Street Journal to the comments and chat section of the Huffington Post in recent days.

If that latter bit strikes you as odd, it should. This is the age of new media, but new media is not, properly, new any longer, and most persons engaged in public communications know how to engage with it. The Internet and its forms give us a remarkable number of avenues for public engagement — far beyond the traditional channels of publications and letters — but the ill-kept secret of using them effectively is not to use most of them. Messaging should be channelled and disciplined, and this goes triple for an eminent person like former Ambassador John Malott. “Social” media in particular (in which we must include something as basic as conversation-oriented blog comments) is geared toward a pattern of share-and-react. What is appropriate among friends generates strife among strangers, and degrades the dignity of, say, an erstwhile Ambassador.

John Malott has not learned this.

He popped up in the Huffington Post’s comments section at nearly four in the morning, issuing two vitriolic responses to a column by Joshua Trevino on Anwar’s trial. Trevino’s essay was neither pro- nor anti-Anwar, being an evenhanded examination of the mistaken assumptions undergirding present Western press coverage of that trial.  Malott, though, apparently took it as an attack on Anwar’s cause, and responded accordingly.

Malott’s first comment was a strange series of inaccurate statements, ranging from a declaration that assault was no longer an issue in Anwar’s trial, which is false; to a bizarre assertion that “Zionist terrorism” is a more morally reprehensible phrase than “Zionist aggression”; to a misunderstanding of what “protege” means. (The issue of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic statements in Malaysian politics was far more accurately addressed by Trevino himself, in the July 20th Washington Times.  Malott closed his comment with a haughty suggestion: “Perhaps you should pick another country to write about.” Unusual advice at the close of a passage that didn’t write about its country particularly well, seemingly petty.

Incredibly, just eight hours later, Malott was back for more. His second comment went in-depth on the specific charges against Anwar, emphasizing that the politician is on trial under Malaysia’s anti-sodomy statute — and not its rape statute — with the purpose of showing Trevino to have been wrong. Instead, he managed to accidentally support the point that Trevino was making: the Huffington Post columnist explicitly acknowledged that Anwar is prosecuted for sodomy, and then went on to examine the deeper meaning of the charges and its coverage. Malott’s argument that the absence of rape charges conclusively eliminates that as a factor in prosecutorial intent will strike anyone familiar with criminal prosecution as risible: reductions and changes in charges are a commonplace throughout developed nations’ legal systems. And as Al Capone discovered when jailed for income-tax evasion, prosecution on one charge doesn’t mean the prosecutor isn’t trying to get you for another. Malott managed to buttress Trevino’s point, and provide an example of the sort of agenda-driven interpretation of Anwar’s trial that the latter was writing about — surely not the former Ambassador’s intent in weighing in.

What, exactly, is Malott’s intent? As has been noted, he’s turning up in Anglophone media lately any time and anywhere that Anwar Ibrahim is mentioned. And he has long ties to the Malaysian politico, not least through his own wife, Hiroko Iwami Malott, who was head of the Japan chapter of the “Free Anwar Campaign” during Anwar’s first trial and imprisonment a decade ago.

Fast-forward to 2005, and we see Anwar and Malott turning up on academic panels together.  The two are said to have remained close over the years.  This is all circumstantial, of course, but it is suggestive of close personal ties to the defendant in the trial, and seemingly a conflict of interest for a credible commentator.  Toss in the odd and unedifying spectacle of a former United States Ambassador picking petty fights in blog comments — with no other history of doing so — and one could reach certain conclusions. But it is not for us to speculate on Malott’s Motives, merely to report that he seems to have lost the sense of balance and serenity one normally expects from a diplomat.

Written by Our Correspondent

A Washington, DC NGO bares some awkward questions for Malaysia’s opposition leader

A 42-page report by a Washington, DC-based whistle-blower organization is proving a major embarrassment for Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim by alleging that the Foundation for the Future, which Anwar headed for a time in the middle of the last decade, was actually established and funded by the US Department of State at the behest of Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of then-Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Bush administration’s neoconservatives.

The Government Accountability Project report, titled The Foundation for the Future: What FOIA Documents Reveal, and released July 8, is based on hundreds of documents delivered to the organization under the US Freedom of Information Act. It says the Foundation for the Future was established and operated in a “highly irregular manner” by Bush administration officials and employees including Shaha Riza, the girlfriend of Paul Wolfowitz, who was forced to leave the World Bank after it became known that he had promoted Riza to triple the World Bank’s salary guidelines. The full report can be found here.

Ostensibly, matching money to fund the Foundation for the Future was supposed to come from 11 countries led by Qatar at US$10 million, and Bahrain, with another US$2 million. Jordan was to put up another US$1 million, Turkey US$500,000 and the rest was to be scattered among several European Union countries including Denmark, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and the European Union itself. But neither Qatar nor Bahrain ever came through. Of the US$22.26 million pledged, only about US$6.4 million ever materialized. The rest apparently was made up from US State Department funds.

Anwar has previously disavowed any US funding of the organization, established in 2005 as “an essential front on the global war on terror” and part of President George Bush’s “freedom agenda” to promote democracy and reform in the Middle East and Africa. Anwar served as chairman and acting president of the organization’s board in the period when he was out of politics following his incarceration on corruption and sexual perversion charges.

The Government Accountability Project report lends considerable ammunition to Anwar’s opponents in the United Malays National Organization, who have long charged that Anwar was connected to the US Central Intelligence Agency, although neither the CIA nor the US government as a whole has ever exhibited any particular desire to bring down the Malaysian government, and in fact considers Malaysia, as a moderate Muslim democracy, to be one of its staunchest allies in the region.

In particular, UMNO Youth Chief Kairy Jamaluddin called attention to Anwar’s statements disavowing US funding of the foundation and demanded that Anwar explain himself. He accused Anwar of misleading the US government in a memorandum of understanding saying the foundation had agreed to get other countries to commit funds to match those the US government was providing.

“For me, it is a serious matter that the opposition leader has tried to mislead the US government to get grants for a foundation that he was chairman of,” Khairy told the Malaysian newspaper The Star.

An Anwar associate said the opposition leader would decline to comment, adding that there was little to be gained by saying anything about the matter. Nonetheless, he characterized Anwar’s role as blameless.

“There is nothing wrong going on,” he said. “This is part of the campaign to get Wolfowitz out of the World Bank and to do so they threw Anwar under the bus.”

The report characterizes the Foundation for the Future as part of a vast and tragic misconception among the Bush administration neoconservatives, particularly Wolfowitz, that a slight push – the elimination of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein from power – would result in a dramatic change in the Middle East. That of course has resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and a realignment in the Middle East that nobody in the west wanted – the growing power of Iran in the region and particularly in Iran’s influence over the Iraqi government itself.

But the Foundation from the start appears to have been a mess, according to the report. It apparently was the brainchild of Shaha Riza, who was seconded from the World Bank by Wolfowitz to run it. As has been widely reported, Riza’s salary increases during external service far exceeded those allowed under World Bank regulations, Wolfowitz allegedly instructed the Department of Human Resources to pay her three times the allowable increase for her grade and circumstances, so that she ended up making more money that Condoleezza Rice, her nominal superior, by about US$7,000, according to the report.

The foundation’s first president, an Iraqi named Bakhtiar Amin, who had served in the new interim government set up following the invasion, quit after a short time on the job because “he was not up to the task.” It appeared that the entire foundation pretty much consisted of Shaha Riza. There was no chief financial officer or chief operations officer.

The Washington Post reported at the time that “Though Shaha Riza, who has been romantically linked to Wolfowitz, is not listed as part of the staff on the organization’s Web site, she is the only person working in the group’s offices. ‘It is basically just her running this thing,’ said Tamara Cofman Wittes, research fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy, who closely tracks democracy programs in the region. She said the board members had no experience in grant-making and thus had ‘started from zero,’ with no bylaws or grant-making guidelines.”

When Anwar was ultimately selected as board chairman, according to the report, it appeared that it was more because Anwar was a friend of Wolfowitz’s rather than for any other reason. “Anwar Ibrahim…was not from the region, and the tactics used to position him as the chair were not transparent,” the report continued.

Ultimately, the report says, less than half of the $60 million in initial funding for the Foundation (as envisioned by Elizabeth Cheney) ever materialized, and the major proportion of funding came from the United States, in violation of the spirit of the legislation creating the institution. The “great multilateral effort…devolved into a unilateral US initiative supported only by Jordan and a smattering of European nations. And the organization that was promoted as a “model” and “beacon of inspiration for the democratic development of the societies in which it operates” represented little more than a nest of sinecures for those people closest to the Vice President: his daughter Liz, Wolfowitz’s girlfriend Shaha Riza and Wolfowitz’s favored friend from Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim.”

The report ends up by questioning whether the US State Department’s representation that Qatar would stump up US$10 million was deliberately perpetrated to circumvent requirements in US law regarding contributions to a Middle East Foundation, whether US law was violated by Shaha Riza’s secondment to the State Department, whether future support for the Foundation is even appropriate, and whether the state Department abused freedom of information law by inappropriately classifying documents in an effort to hide them from whistle-blowers.

A team of aspiring young footballers from Kuala Lumpur is to play in two international tournaments in the United States and Sweden in July.

An Under-18 team from the Kuala Lumpur Youth Soccer League (KLYS) will compete in the ESPN-Disney Cup in Orlando while an Under-15 team and an Under-13 team will play in the Gothia Cup in Gothenburg, Sweden.

KLYS director, Elcee Asuncion Villa said  ”I really hope the 32 boys taking part will be competitive enough and will build a good relationship with other players from different countries. It’s not all about winning the game,” she told reporters.

Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak says that a target of 6 percent annual growth for GDP is achievable.

Speaking at the launch of the Oxford Oxford Business Group’s “The Report Malaysia 2010″ in Kuala Lumpur, the Prime Minister said: “The challenge is to reduce fiscal deficit to less than three per cent by 2015 from 5.3 per cent now.” And he added that private investment has a bigger role to play in the Malaysian economy. “Another important facet is that the government must point out at the sectors where the private sector can invest,” Najib said.

The Prime Minister said that such areas would include the 12 National Key Economic Areas that have already been identified and that innovation will be vital. “It is clear that countries that make innovation a priority, and we would certainly drive this, have a clearer competitive advantage,” he said.

And he added, “Malaysia is poised to undertake the major structural transformation that a high-income economy requires through an approach that is holistic yet focused on specific outcomes.”

A cross section of Malaysia’s food industry took part in the prestigious three-day New York Fancy Food Show with assistance from the New York office of the Malaysian External Trade Corporation (Matrade).

The event is an opportunity for sellers from abroad to meet American buyers and showcase their products. Among the Malaysian products on show were halal cookies, ready to serve seafood and green tea.

The event followed the Malaysia Kitchen Programme, organised by Matrade three months ago, which aimed to introduce Malaysian cuisine to American consumers.

Malaysia’s food exports to the US reached about US$600 million in 2009. 

During the first four months of this current year, Malaysia’s food exports grew by 39 per cent growth compared with the same period last year.

The Index of Economic Freedom in conjunction with the Wall Street Journal has ranked Malaysia as the 59th freest economy out of 179 countries.

Malaysia scored 64.8 this year,  – 0.2 points better than last year.

Malaysia was ranked ninth out of 41 countries in the Asia-Pacific region and its overall score was above the world and regional averages, the Index of Economic Freedom said. Malaysia’s ongoing reform measures have improved the overall entrepreneurial environment, leading it to score above the world average in eight out of 10 economic freedom components.

Malaysia’s highest score was 84.3 for fiscal freedom and the Index said that Malaysia’s financial sector had weathered the global economic crisis relatively well.

Tourism Malaysia will introduce a three-year plan to boost the country’s tourism promotion campaign, said its director-general Datuk Mirza Mohammad Taiyab.

“We have prepared the plan to further promote tourism in Malaysia to foreign tourists and visitors. The plan could perhaps bring more opportunities to tourists and industry players as well,” he said.

The Malaysia-India Business Council is exploring how it can enhance opportunities for entrepreneurs from both countries to tap into sectors such as manufacturing, IT and non-IT industries, infrastructure, services, bio-technology, health and education.

At a seminar called ‘Towards A Strategic Partnership-Tapping Growth Opportunities,’ some 500 business leaders from Malaysia and India will get together to explore business prospects between the two nations.

“The aim is to bring together specified and targeted industries from Malaysia and India, to create awareness and a better understanding, of what each has to offer the other,” Malaysia-India Business Council president Datuk Krishnan Tan told reporters.

Malaysia’s exports to India stood at RM6.6 billion and imports at RM2.6 billion between January  and April 2010. India was Malaysia’s 12th largest trading partner in 2009.