We’ve got a representative of the theocratic tyranny in Iran doing a propaganda tour of the US during the 9/11 anniversary, and now the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations is giving an award for “human relations” to another raving radical Islamic nutjob: A Hezbollah apologist wins an award for tolerance. (Hat tip: SoCalJustice.)

In October 2000, Maher Hathout attended a rally in Lafayette Park across from the White House. His speech was captured on video for posterity by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. He told the assembled crowd that he was not surprised by what he called the “atrocities committed by the apartheid brutal state of Israel.” After all, he reasoned, “butchers do what butchers do, and … what is expected from a racist apartheid [state] is what is happening now.”

Fast forward six years. The Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations announced last Tuesday that Hathout, president of the Islamic Center of Southern California and a senior adviser to the Muslim Public Affairs Council (mpac), would receive its prestigious John Allen Buggs Award in luncheon ceremonies on October 5. The award is given annually for what the commission describes as “outstanding human relations work.”

A man who called Israel a nation of butchers (he didn’t stop there; he has also accused the United States of committing state terrorism) is about to be honored with a major award for effective practices in human relations work. Is this any different than giving, say, David Duke an award for healing racial relations?

Hathout’s hatred of Israel is well-documented, and it is often accompanied by extremely venomous remarks about the United States. After threatening Arab governments with a “general intifada” for holding summits with Israeli participation (he warned that their leaders would be “flushed down in the cesspools of history of treason”), Hathout addressed the American people directly in his Lafayette Park speech:

You have been terribly disappointed and sadly misled. You have been manipulated. You are financing an apartheid state that is contrary to everything you ever dreamed for or approved of. You [are being] taken … down a path of evil. … You are making the face of America ugly all over the world. …

They say Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. This is a lie. Israel is not a democracy; Israel is a theocracy, and is an apartheid state against every fiber of the modern world. They say that Israel guards our interests in the Middle East. When did Israel guard the interests of America in the Middle East? Israel endangers the American interests in the Middle East.

Hathout has received mysteriously gentle treatment from the press. Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington in 1998, he defended Hezbollah, declaring that the government-identified terrorist group “is fighting only for freedom, an organized army, limiting its operations against military people—this is a legitimate target against occupation.” In a debate carried on a Los Angeles radio station later that year, he asserted that Hezbollah’s activity in Lebanon “is very American, is what America did in the beginning against the colonizing of the British, is what all honorable people in the world are doing.”

You can bypass the New Republic’s registration check and read the whole thing by following the link from this Google News page.

Previously at LGF:
MPAC Wants to Fight ‘Terrorism’.