If President Obama is such a good friend of Israel, why did he pick Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, as one of his representatives to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ‘s Human Dimension Implementation Meeting? This conference is perhaps the largest Human rights conference in the world. And Salam Al-Marayati is no human rights activist. He supports terrorist groups and believes that Israel was behind 9/11.According to the Jewish Press, Al-Marayati doesn’t even have the qualifications to be on the delegation:
While two out of three of the U.S. representatives are scholars whose fields suggest expertise in human rights and democratization, and are entirely consistent with the themes of the OSCE and, specifically, human rights and democracy, Al-Marayati’s appointment raises serious questions.
Al-Marayati is not the kind of person who “appreciates human rights.” Or to put it another way, he is a supporter of terrorist groups who incites against Israel.
On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Al-Marayati used a Los Angeles talk radio program as a forum in which to accuse the Israelis of conducting that morning’s attacks on New York and Washington.
If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on this list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.
Al-Marayati has also called for the U.S. government to unfreeze the assets of two Islamic charities, the Global Relief Foundation and the Holy Land Foundation, that were shut down by the government because of funding they had given to terrorist organizations.
Al-Marayati refuses to call Hezbollah a terrorist group. “I don’t think any group should be judged 100% this or that,” he says. “I think every group is going to have . . . its claim of liberation and resistance.” He has similarly justified Hamas‘ existence as a political entity that promotes social programs and “educational operations.”
During a 1997 speech he delivered at the University of Pennsylvania, Al-Marayati equated the concept of jihad to the statements of the eighteenth-century American statesman Patrick Henry. Said Al-Marayat, “[T]he person who we think in America would epitomize jihad would be Patrick Henry, who said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ That is a way of looking at the term jihad from an American perspective.” (source: Discover the Networks).
So I guess the question becomes, does Obama agree with Al-Marayati that Israel is behind 9/11? Does he think like Al-Marayati that Hamas and Hezbollah are not terrorist groups? If he does, he should be honest about it, and if he doesn’t—then he should explain why he picked this guy to represent the United States at a Human Rights Conference.