Mohammed (or Mohammad) Taki Mehdi, commonly M. T. Mehdi (January 6, 1928 - February 23, 1998) was an Arab-American Muslim based in CA, then in New York, one of the earliest anti-Israel ("pro-palestinian") "activists" in the United States. He held debates on television and radio with many supporters of Israel. Mehdi was a racist, antisemite.
Emigrated from Iraq ca. 1950.
Set up the Arab Information Office in San Francisco in the 1950s. In 1961, he received a doctorate in constitutional law from Berkeley . Mehdi had served as secretary general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs since 1964, the year the council was formed. That same year, he was elected president of the American Arab Relations Committee, a position he held until his death. Both organizations are based in New York City.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Mohammed T. Mehdi emerged as the prominent anti-Israel Arab-American activist and propagandist in the United States.
First active as director of the Arab Information Center of San Francisco.
From a May 1962 report[1]:
Mehdi... was asked by a good-hearted Westerner why the Arabs and Jews can't live together in peace. Mehdi's reply: “Would you want to live with them?” This occasioned an outburst on the part of the questioner, a non-Jew, provoked by the obvious anti-Semitism.
Lilian McPherson, another non-Jew, writing on the editorial page of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury said: “One wonders about Dr. Mehdi's techniques and ultimate objectives. Especially, I say this, after attending a student meeting at San Jose State, where Arab students heckled a speaker on Israel by saying, ‘Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job.’” She went on to describe Dr. Mehdi's links with the Arab Students Organization at San Jose State College.
In 1966, Israeli peace activist Abie Nathan canceled a planned joint appearance with Mehdi after learning that Mehdi’s organization, the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, supported the emigration of much of Israel’s Jewish population.[2] In today's language it's called ethnic cleansing. Later that year, Mehdi drew criticism after urging King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to avoid landing in New York, which he referred to as “this Tel Aviv of the Atlantic.”[3]
In 1967, Six-Day War, when the defeat of the Arab armies was known to the world as one of the most crushing in history, T. Mehdi, as secretary-general of the Action Committee on Arab-American Relations stated[4]:
"Nothing has changed. Israel is worse[sic] than Nazi Germany, and the Arabs will have to drive her from the region. The war will continue precisely as it has been going for the past 19 years. And what the American and the English took away from the Arabs by their intervention, the Arabs will recover at the conference table. Peace talks, of course, will have to be conducted through third parties at the United Nations, because no Arab leader will ever negotiate directly with Israel. You'll see. The United Nations will force Israel back to her 1948 boundaries, after which all Arab nations will unite in a war to exterminate her, because this is going to be just like the Crusades. Peace talks will fail. The Arabs will continue their fight and in the end they'll do exactly what they've said. Push Israel into the sea."
In 1968, Mehdi said that the Arab terrorist Sirhan Sirhan acted justifiably in his assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.[5][6][7] In fact, Mehdi was the first voice in the USA to draw the connection between the attack on Sen. Kennedy and the Arab cause. Even before Kennedy died.[8]
Antisemitic Mehdi was[8] probably the first known Arab propagandists to peddle then the Pallyweid's "genocide" lie on Israel.[9]
By 1970, Mehdi was editing the Arabic-language weekly Action, described as a pro-Arab publication in the United States. Although critical of Israel, Mehdi acknowledged that Israel enjoyed greater press freedom than Arab states, attributing this partly to Western democratic influences. The same report noted that many Arab editors in North America believed Jews or Israelis exercised substantial influence over the American media.[10]
Propagating in 1970 [11]: I remember how pleased I was when the Vatican Council resolved that the Jews of today are not responsible for what ever might have happened to Jesus 2,000 years ago because of the activities of some Jews, even though I don't think it was necessarily up to the Vatican Council to assign guilt or remove it. By the same token, however, the Jews of today should not expect any rights to Palestine because of the rule of one Jews over the land 2,000 years ago.
In 1975 Mehdi said: "Sadat may have the right to recognize a Jewish state on Sinai but not in Palestine."[12]
He claimed he and assassinated conservative Meir Kahane were 'respected' adversaries, and said they had appeared on dozens of television shows discussing MiddleEast issues.[13]
NYT[14]: A critic of Israel who fostered Muslims' political awareness. Over years, he took public positions on a wide variety of subjects involving the Middle East, Arab-Americans, Muslims and Islam, and he became an adviser to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the radical Muslim cleric linked to the World Trade Center bombing... Mr. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said, Representing the National Council on Islamic Affairs, Mehdi was a vocal supporter of the sheik, who one could describe as the spiritual leader of the World Trade Center bombers -- the blind sheik who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. ... Dr. Mehdi has also been quoted as asserting that New York is a Zion town. Mr. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said, He was a lifelong Arab propagandist, a one-man organization without any constituency except for the media, who needed an Arab spokesman in New York on any occasion when the Arab delegations or ambassadors would not talk.
In July 1993, he advocated for jihadi Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman well being.[15]
In Aug 1993, as secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, Mehdi said the sheik’s indictment is “a triumph of paranoia and intolerance in America.”[16]
Mehdi testified as an 'expert witness' on Islamic issues[13] at the 1995 trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. All were convicted. At the time, he said he felt that one of his missions was to "promote a better understanding of the Islamic people of the American process."
He died of cardiac arrest at Bellevue Hospital in 1998.
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References
- ↑ Milton Friedman, 'Arab Propaganda in California'.The Canadian Jewish Chronicle — May 11, 1962. Page 6.
“ Mohammed T. Mehdi (Mohammed Taki Mehdi), director of the Arab Information Center of San Francisco, ... Before another audience, he was asked by a good-hearted Westerner why the Arabs and Jews can't live together in peace. Mehdi's reply: “Would you want to live with them?” This occasioned an outburst on the part of the questioner, a non-Jew, provoked by the obvious anti-Semitism.
Lilian McPherson, another non-Jew, writing on the editorial page of the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury said: “One wonders about Dr. Mehdi's techniques and ultimate objectives. Especially, I say this, after attending a student meeting at San Jose State, where Arab students heckled a speaker on Israel by saying, ‘Too bad Hitler didn't finish the job.’” She went on to describe Dr. Mehdi's links with the Arab Students Organization at San Jose State College.
When Arab propagandist Fayez A. Sayegh, a visiting professor of political science at another West coast university, addressed San Jose students, he was enthusiastically introduced by a faculty member. The host admits John Birch Society membership and was the subject of controversy when he asked “patriotic” students to report “subversive” statements by instructors and fellow students.
At the International Student House on the University of California campus, at Berkeley, the Israeli flag was twice torn down by Arab students.
A seminar on “Social Change In The Middle East,” sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Northern California, featured six “authorities” — all pro-Arab. Anti-Israel reading lists were distributed. Registrants included Admiral M. P. Evenson, director of the so-called “American Friends of the Middle East” for the Western United States...
An Israeli Arab Christian, visiting the area to observe labor unions of Histadrut, was threatened with death by an unruly mob of Arab students at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Invited to speak before a campus group, the Israeli Arab was rudely harassed, called “traitor”...
” - ↑ "Abie Nathan Rejects Joint Conference with Arab Propagandist in N.Y.", Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 24, 1966.
- ↑ "Faisal’s Anti-jewish Remarks Evoke Criticism in U.S. Congress", Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 24, 1966.
- ↑ Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the ... Congress. (1967). United States: U.S. Government Printing Office. pp. 22142-22146
[1].
From Look magazine, August 8, 1967. Israel: A Nation Too Young to Die. (By James Michener) [...] On the night when the defeat of the Arab armies was known to the world as one of the most crushing in history. I discussed matters on an all-night radio show with Dr. T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the Action Committee on Arab-American Relations. And he made these points: "Nothing has changed. Israel is worse[sic] than Nazi Germany, and the Arabs will have to drive her from the region. The war will continue precisely as it has been going for the past 19 years. And what the American and the English took away from the Arabs by their intervention, the Arabs will recover at the conference table. Peace talks, of course, will have to be conducted through third parties at the United Nations, because no Arab leader will ever negotiate directly with Israel. You'll see. The United Nations will force Israel back to her 1948 boundaries, after which all Arab nations will unite in a war to exterminate her, because this is going to be just like the Crusades. Peace talks will fail. The Arabs will continue their fight and in the end they'll do exactly what they've said. Push Israel into the sea."
Nasser will probably gain more from the Arab world in defeat than he would have gained in victory. The war made him a tragic hero. His people will forget about his military failures. Soon, his new crop of generals will be making the old speeches of 1948, 1956 and 1967. His people will believe them, for fantasy is impossible to eradicate if one's whole culture is structured on the perpetuation of the fantasy.
Yet we must dispel that fantasy. To do so is the job to which we are all committed... unless we are content to watch this pathetic farce of Arab self-delusion repeated in 1977, 1988 and 1999.
- ↑ Pennock, P. E. (2017). The Rise of the Arab American Left: Activists, Allies, and Their Fight Against Imperialism and Racism, 1960s–1980s. United States: University of North Carolina Press, p.133. "Mehdi invents Sirhan's words in an imagined dialogue between Sirhan and Israeli politician Abba Eban."
- ↑ Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the ... Congress. (1969). United States: U.S. Government Printing Office, p
9235 [2].
“ How Arab Propagandists and Their Friends Work in America. Hon. James H. Scheuer. Of New York. In the House of Representatives. Tuesday, April 15, 1969. ... It is a commonly heard complaint from Arab quarters that their cause has "no voice" in America. In point of fact, the exact opposite is the case. Each of the 14 Arab states has its own delegation—and usually its own Informer officer—at the United Nations. On top of that. the Arab Information Center, operating for all of the Arab League states, maintains headquarters in New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francesco and Dallas—plus a representative in Florida.
There is also the Palestine Arab Delegation—which purports torepresent the indigenous[sic] Arab inhabitants of Palestine, but is actually the registered agency for the Arab Higher Committee of Palestine, headed by Haj Amin el-Husseini, better known as the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. (He was once Hitler's special adviser on the "final solution of the Jewish problem.")
Most reprehensible of all is the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—an agency established and financed by the Arab Largos, atates for the express purpose of organizing guerrilla units to invade Israel, in order to bring an end to what it Insits upon calling the "Zionist usurpation" there. This agency is openly dedicated to defiance of United Nations peacekeeping resolution...
The mere presence of so many Arab state delegations at the United Nations provides kind of built-in advantage for certain propaganda purposes When Security Council denotes are televised. for Instance, thenmber of minutes given to Arab spokesmen and their supporters is invariably several times greater than those given to Israel and her usually less-verbose friends. On these decisions, moreover, the Arabs have generally seen fit to play fast and loose with the ordinary rules of diplomatic courtesy, while objecting to any slight technical deviation from the ruled by those on the other side...
The expenditures of the Palestine Arab Delegation are much smaller than those of the Arab Information Center (with its numerous branches), but its activities are a matter of special concern, because unlike most foreign propaganda agencies this 'delegation' concerns itself very directly with internal affairs of the United States...
…the same methods, would be hustled out of the country at once, or put in jail.
NEO-NAZIS AIDED.
Even more reprehensible, however, is the relationship which this agency has built up with some of the more extreme hate-groups in the United States, where the obvious effort is to set American citizens of different religions against each other. At one period, indeed, the 'Delegation' actually permitted a self-avowed neo-Nazi group, the National Renaissance Party, to use the Arab postage meter for the purpose of mailing out the 'Party’s' own vicious anti-Jewish publication. On another occasion, “literature” written by the Palestine Arab Delegation was made available for printing in *Common Sense* (described in a staff report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “the source of some of the most vitriolic hate propaganda ever to come to this Committee’s attention”)—and the material actually appeared in two editions of *Common Sense* even before the Delegation got around to issuing its own pamphlet edition. Other hate-literature from the same source has been extensively used by Gerald L. K. Smith, and equally notorious American anti-Jewish agitators.
It is one thing to advocate a national cause; it is something quite different for a foreign agency to try to stir up dissension in a country with which peaceful relations presumably prevail.
We should emphasize here that the Palestine Arab Delegation is not a self-supported group of agitators. It has filed its official registration papers with the Department of Justice (Foreign Agent Registration No. 1459) as an agency of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine, with headquarters at Almansurieh, Lebanon; and the Higher Committee’s Chairman, the former Grand Mufti, is listed as residing in Egypt, near Cairo. Early publications of the “Delegation” list support from the four Arab states surrounding Israel, but more recently only the Higher Committee’s sponsorship appeared. The “Delegation” is recognized at the United Nations, to the extent of appearing before various official committees, where it claims to represent the Arab Palestinians. These facts make its uninvited intervention in America’s domestic affairs all the more inexcusable.
STUDENTS USED AS AGITATORS.
A survey of this subject would be incomplete without mention of the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada, which has units on over a hundred American college campuses. The United States welcomes students from all parts of the world, and tries to help them secure an education—but in this particular case, the students who belong to the Organization are also told to consider themselves as political spokesmen for the views of their home governments. The Organization prints an elaborate magazine, which contains some of the most violent anti-Israel propaganda that we have seen—and its national convention has entertained speakers from the Palestine Liberation Organizations. Apart from other considerations, it seems hardly appropriate for an organization of foreign students, with obvious support from outside governments, to engage in such activities while its members are guests in our own country.
At its last-year’s National Convention the Organization of Arab Students honored Dr. M. T. Mehdi as its “Man of the Year.” Dr. Mehdi, a former employee of the Arab Information Center (at its San Francisco branch), now heads The Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, an ostensibly domestic agency which describes itself as “an organization dedicated to better American-Arab understanding.”
Dr. Mehdi’s principal claim to fame, however, is the authorship of a book entitled “Kennedy and Sirhan, Why?”—the outrageous theme of which is that the Jordanian assassin of the late Senator Robert Kennedy ought to be thought of as a political prisoner, instead of being tried for murder in the ordinary way in the courts of California.
“Sirhan’s act is not an ordinary case of murder: it is a political act and political assassination. Hence traditional legal devices and legal remedies cannot adequately provide proper defense for the accused,” we are told. Mehdi, in effect, tries to make Sirhan’s terrible crime into a mere incident in the war between Arabs and Israelis (with the late senator classified as an Israeli protagonist). The idea is thus suggested that Sirhan should be treated as “a prisoner of war,” with Kennedy classified as “a casualty in that war.”
Must our government tolerate this? In short, Arab propaganda runs the entire gamut from slick-paper appeals intended to influence people with cultural and intellectual curiosity, to the stirring up of race hatreds, the organization of guerrillas, and even a quasi-exculpation of assassination.
Some aspects of this agitation are almost certainly contrary to American law, and are certainly in violation of good public policy. There is no excuse to permit the intentional stirring up of group hatreds in this country by people acting in the name of a foreign government, and our international obligations are clearly inconsistent with allowing the continued operation of militarist-terrorist groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization.
” - ↑ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Jun 6, 1968.
SIRHAN REPORTED ACTIVE IN PRO-ARAB COLLEGE ORGANIZATION. Accused Assailant, Family Came to U.S. in 1957 From Jordan Village. JERUSALEM, June 5 (AP) — Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, identified in California as a man of Jordanian origin who shot Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, came from a small village of terraced Palestine near Jerusalem, Arab sources said tonight. “Records in Washington showed that Sirhan, with his father, mother, a number of brothers and a sister, arrived in New York Jan. 12, 1957—not long after one of the three Israeli-Arab wars began. Sirhan then was 12. Arab sources said other members of the Sirhan family, known in Jerusalem as Sarhan—pronounced Sakhan—still live at Silwan on the outskirts of Old Jerusalem in the West Bank sector seized by Israel from Jordan last June. There are about 250 persons named Sirhan in the village, all members of branches of the same family, the sources said. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington showed that Sirhan was born March 19, 1944. At that time, the area was ruled by Britain under the League of Nations Palestine mandate. With Britain’s blessing, Jordan became an independent kingdom in 1946. There was no known police record of Sirhan in the Jerusalem area. Authorities in Los Angeles said Sirhan had been living with a brother, Munir “Joe” Sirhan of Pasadena, a department store employe. They also mentioned another brother, Adel, as having participated in the process of identification. None of the Sirhan family in America was naturalized, the immigration department in Washington said. The secretary-general of the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, Dr. Mohammed T. Mehdi, said in New York that Sirhan was a student at Pasadena State College and was active in the Organization of Arab Students at the college. Mehdi is known in the New York area as a propagandist for Arab causes. Mehdi said Sirhan “may have been inflamed” by a statement made last Saturday night during the broadcast McCarthy-Kennedy debate in California. Kennedy said at one point, “I think we have a commitment to Israel, for its own sake, that has to be kept.”.. Sirhan comes from a part of the world where the word “assassin” originated centuries ago. A secret order of Ismaili Moslems terrorized Christians and other enemies, while allegedly under the influence of hashish, at the time of the Crusades. They were called assassins from a corruption of the word hashish...
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Jewish Currents. (1968). United States: Jewish Currents, p.3 [3]. "The first voice in the USA to draw the connection between the attack on Sen. Kennedy and the Arab cause was Dr. Mohammed T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the Action Committee on Arab-American Relations. Even before Sen. Kennedy died, Dr. Mehdi declared that Sirhan" may have been inflamed" ..."
- ↑ The "genocide" LIE [4].(Google)
- ↑ "Arabic Press in U.S., Canada Dislike Israel; Mehdi Concedes Israel Has Free Press", Jewish Telegraphic Agency, December 24, 1970.
- ↑ "Arab Tells His Side Of Mideast Conflict". By Eve Taylor. The Evening News Oct 1, 1970
- ↑ Holasz, Louis. "Ill-advised Sadat Treeads on Rawest of U.S. nerves", Windsor Star, 1975-11-10.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "M.T. Mehdi, voice of Arab America, dies", UPI, February 24, 1998.
- ↑ Holasz first=Louis. "M. T. Mehdi, 70, Arab-American Leader", The New York Times, February 25, 1998.
- ↑ "Immigration Board Rejects Sheik's Plea for Asylum", Baltimore Sun, July 10, 1993. .. "Dr. Mehdi said that officials at the Federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., told him yesterday that Mr. Abdel Rahman was still hospitalized..."
- ↑ "Sheik’s indictment leaves followers in state of shock Claim government is anti-Muslim", Baltimore Sun, August 26, 1993.