Fitzgerald: A tribute to Edward Mortimer

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald lionizes the arch-dhimmi Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan’s speechwriter at the UN:

The Director of Communications at the U.N. and Kofi Annan’s Chief Speechwriter (and also his “Senior Adviser”) is one Edward Mortimer, formerly with the Euro-Arab Dialogue branch of the E.U., and before that, a journalist with a variety of English newspapers. He is most famous, among those who remember what he wishes they would forget, for the absolute delight with which he greeted that primitive pro-fascist mass-murderer, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who in his writings carefully explains to whom it is licit to serve the cooked remains of a goat, a camel, a sheep with which you have had sexual intercourse and then killed and cooked. That allows one to deal with that famous problem immortalized in song — “breaking-up-is-hard-to-do” — and at the same time thriftily observing the ethic of “waste not, want not.” And then, of course, there are the Ayatollah’s remarks on the absolute necessity of making war on the Infidels (see, for bloodthirsty samples, Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim, pp 11-12, and Robert Spencer’s Islam Unveiled, p. 35).Here is what Edward Mortimer, the man who puts the words in Kofi Annan’s mouth and therefore helps to mold what pass for Kofi Annan’s “thoughts,” wrote when the Ayatollah Khomeini first came to power, as reported by the English writer Anthony Howard:

Way back at the start of 1979, when the Iranian people took to the streets and the late Shah was overthrown, the media – as I recall – did not so much give a shudder of horror as heave a sigh of relief. Indeed, one London periodical (the ultra-respectable, middle-of-the-road Spectator) went almost overboard in its exultation. Writing from Teheran, one of its contributors, Mr. Edward Mortimer of The Times of London, actually went so far as to begin his article with Charles James Fox’s comment on the fall of the Bastille: ”How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, and how much the best!” Those words, added Mr. Mortimer, seemed to him ”entirely apposite.”

That is Mortimer on Khomeini’s resistible rise: “How much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world, and how much the best” are words, he wrote, that seemed to him “entirely apposite.”

And not surprisingly, Mortimer is venomous on the subject of Israel. Now the real antisemites, as is known, have a few topics that they cannot leave alone, that haunt them, that they love to discuss endlessly. For some, it may be the supposedly “deliberate” attack by Israeli planes on the U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967 — despite the careful analyses and now the released tapes that show conclusively that it was, of course, a mistake, friendly fire of the most understandable kind. (This does not prevent the likes of James Bamford in one of his books from claiming, without the least evidence, that Israel did this in order to “cover up” its crimes of executing Egyptian prisoners — but then Bamford, of course, is the kind of man who pretends to be a tough, no-nonsense clear-eyed defender of America while opposing efforts to wiretap violent jihadists and insisting that there is no problem with Islam or a Jihad, no, of course not — the problem is America’s unreserved and total (!) “support of Israel.” Tell that to the Christians in East Timor or the Southern Sudan.Now there is one other favorite topos of the convinced antisemite. And that is that the “Zionists” collaborated with — the Nazis. This nauseating charge is made, in fact, by among others, one Lenni Brenner. No serious reviewer would bother with such trash. But Edward Mortimer found the thesis of a Zionist-Nazi collaboration so convincing, so meritorious, that he wrote a rave review that was then used as the introduction for a new edition of the book. That tells one all one needs to know about Edward Mortimer’s deepest impulses, and not only when it comes to Israel.

So this is the man who, though he had praised Khomeini to the Jacobin skies back in 1979, and heaped praise on Lonni Brenner’s antisemitic viciousness back in 1984, was hired nonetheless — no, make that “was hired for that reason” — by the United Nations. It is Edward Mortimer who puts the “twaddle” in Kofi Annan’s mouth — the mouth of the man who heads an organization that has been taken over by the Islamintern. Edward Mortimer deserves the U.N.; the U.N. deserves Edward Mortimer. What a mix, what a continuous Witches’ Sabbath on the East River.

Meanwhile, a million black Christians in southern Nigeria died, many of them killed by Egyptian pilots bombing civilians — and the U.N. did nothing. The U.N. did nothing when 200,000 Christians in East Timor died; it was the Australians who had to rescue the rest with their own troops. In 20 years of genocidal attacks, the U.N. has done nothing effective to help the Christians of the southern Sudan, despite the superb and anguished reports of its Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro. Kofi Annan went out of his way to prevent General Romeo Dalaire from acting to intervene and head off the Rwanda Genocide. The Hutus, incidentally, had earlier received arms from Egypt; at the time, the Secretary-General was the sad-eyed Boutros Boutros Ghali, a man deeply afraid of the Egyptian Government. Kofi Annan was in charge of peacekeeping.

The ongoing discussions about Darfur are farcical. The U.N. will not and cannot act, because the Arab League, and many other Muslim countries, will simply not permit any intervention to save either non-Muslims or non-Arab Muslims when they are under attack by Muslim Arabs. Only against Iraq, in the past 30 years, has the U.N. authorized military force against a Muslim power. And it was not to rescue the Kurds during the Al-Anfal Operation against them. No, it was only in response to the invasion of Kuwait and the threatened invasion of Saudi Arabia — for then other Muslim powers were directly threatened. And the resolutions left over from the end of that first Gulf War were the only reason the United States obtained some half-hearted backing this time around.

But unless it is other Muslims who are being threatened, the U.N. will never, ever, take the side of intervention. It has been thoroughly infiltrated by pro-Islamic, and anti-Israel and anti-American forces. And Edward Mortimer beautifully exemplifies all three strands. He deserves special attention and no doubt a special prize from Muslim sources — for efforts that surpass even what they expected.

Well done, Edward Mortimer. Well done, illegitimate Edward.

In fact, should not Edward Mortimer have been invited to the Dallas shindig last year that celebrated the Works and Days of the Ayatollah Khomeini, so as to have leant it a certain false olde-worlde charm, and given it the benefit of that pseudo-plummy voice, brimming with self-confidence, and all the rest of what Edward Mortimer has to offer — which is what, exactly?