MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
Wikileaks: Soros Memo Accused Obama of Fueling Radical Islam to Push TPP
A March 2016 email published Monday by the organization Wikileaks reveals that George Soros, in anticipation of a meeting with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, requested Podesta read a memo accusing President Barack Obama of emboldening radical Islam in Malaysia in order to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) passed.
Podesta received an email in March 2016 from Soros spokesperson Michael Vachon. “I have attached a memo on TPP and Malaysia, as it may come up when you see George and Alex [Soros, George’s son],” he writes. “In general I think George is more interested in talking about policy than the campaign per se, though I can’t imagine you won’t spend some time on politics.”
Podesta later forwards the attached memo in question to another Clinton campaign official. Subsequent emails seem to indicate Podesta met George and Alex Soros for dinner on March 15 of this year.
The attached memo, titled “The TPP and Malaysia’s Corruption Crisis,” argues that President Obama has wrongfully chosen to support the government of Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, accused of a variety of outrageous abuses of power and responsible for the dynamic growth of radical Islam in the southeast Asian nation.
The memo appears to have been authored by John Pang, a board member at Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Pang writes that Najib is “a poster boy for the 21st century kleptocracy” who has used “a racial supremacist ideology that is collapsing under the weight of corruption” to perpetuate himself in power. Najib, he argues, has created “a Malay-Islamic state in which Sunni Islam’s supremacy is indivisible from the political and legal supremacy of the Malay race.” The result is a country in which “1 in 10 Muslims there had favorable views of ISIS and that a 53% majority were in favor of implementing Hudud, the Islamic penal code.”
Pang writes that, specifically, Malaysia under Najib has enacted laws prohibiting non-Muslims from using the word “Allah,” banned Bibles in the Malay language, and seen thousands of its citizens leave Malaysia to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. At home, Najib has “raised street demonstrations threatening violence against the nation’s Chinese and Christian minorities and fanned anti-Semitism,” Pang writes.
The more prominent allegations of corruption against Najib, the memo argues, the more he has embraced radical Islam.
Malaysia is a key player in the passage of TPP, however, which is nominally a measure to attempt to court China’s major trading partners to do more business with the United States.
“The Obama administration has made heavy and often personal bets on the leadership of Prime Minister Najib Razak as a partner in the region in the ‘pivot to Asia’ and the struggle against Islamic radicalism,” the memo argues. “These priorities have been undercut by being subsumed under the administration’s aggressive pursuit of the TPP.”
Since Najib assumed power, Malaysia has been home to some of the most outrageous violations of human rights in the name of Islam in the world. Among them are the arrest of a rapper for using the word “Allah” in a rap song, the arrest of a teenage girl for hugging a pop singer in public, protests against another teenage girl for hugging a dog (dogs are considered “unclean” in Islam), the banning of the phrase “hot dog” as it confused Muslims into thinking they were eating dog meat, widespread protests against Cadbury chocolate eggs, and the arrests of couples celebrating St. Valentine’s Day.
Malaysia has been refused FIFA soccer hosting duties over refusing to let Israeli nationals into the country, and its government has admitted to monitoring liberal Muslim “deviants” as a national security threat.
The first successful Islamic State attack in Malaysia occurred in July 2016, and targeted a Cuban nightclub.