Review 22.6
24 April - 10 May , 1997

Chandra Muzaffar is a Malaysian academic, social activist and director of the Just World Trust (JUST). Muzaffar claims that the "concept of the Jew is a mixture of bigotry and jingoism." He is virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Western, and a supporter of the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. For almost a decade, following his arrest for opposing the Malaysian government, Muzaffar has built JUST into a highly active international organisation, with chapters in 17 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, the United States, United Kingdom, Sudan and Iran. JUST has been able to boast an international advisory board including leftist intellectuals including Professor Noam Chomsky, the late Erskine Childers, and Professor Richard Falk.

In a March 23, 1996 letter Chandra Muzaffar echoed Edward Said's description of the Oslo Accords as "not a just peace." He refused to condemn the February-March suicide bombings by Hamas which killed 60 innocent men, women and children. Instead of criticising the suicide bombers, Muzaffar railed against Israel, accusing even then Prime Minister Shimon Peres of wanting to continue "Israeli occupation." He wrote that the world should not be shocked at the suicide bombings, and that because of Israeli injust ice Palestinian men "choose to die dreaming of freedom rather than live under the heel of oppression. Muzaffar has publicly defended Hamas official Dr Abu Marzook against charges that he has been involved in terrorism. Instead, Muzaffar described Marzook, a leader of a group responsible for hundreds of Israeli civilian deaths as a freedom fighter.

"it is the brazen terrorism of the Israeli regime which has driven millions of Palestinians to despair," he wrote in an open letter to the US District Court hearing his extradition case to Israel. The director of JUST also claims that the Sudanese Government, which has been engaged in a massacre of Christian and animists in the south of the country, "has been accommodative towards" them.

When asked in February 1995 about the death fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie, Dr Muzaffar described Rushdie's work as "destructive ideas", which should be "demolished ... with intelligent discourse, and not resort to violence".

But, according to Muzaffar, Iran is not a terrorist state. The US, he claimed in August 1996, labelled numerous states, including Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria as states that sponsor and engage in terrorism. He also described Western efforts to stop exploitation of workers, saying, "They only want to protect their own interests and jobs from the more competitive labour force from developing countries."

Even US criticism of China is spurned by Muzaffar, who is reported as claiming that China is unjustly criticised for having a poor human rights record.

Outside the realm of domestic Malaysian politics and social reform in Islam, Muzaffar is radically to the left. He pursues a virulently critical tone of the West, and is associated with some of the leading international anti-Western campaigners including Noam Chomsky and Princeton law professor Richard Falk. According to Muzaffar, "It is the US and Western dominance ... which is the root cause of global conflict."

Also damning, and revealing of an underlying hatred of Jews and Israel is Muzaffar's support of French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. Garaudy's book, Founding Myths of Israeli Policy, has been widely criticised for its denial of the Holocaust, and accusations that Jews use the 'myth' as a license to commit atrocities against the Palestinians. An earlier work of Garaudy, Affaire Israel, published in English as The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism, compares Zionism to Nazism and likens the actions of Israel to Nazi Germany, the pogroms in Imperial Russia, and the Spanish Inquisition.

In early 1996, Garaudy was charged under the 1990 Gayssot Law in France for the denial of crimes against humanity. Founding Myths claims the Nazis only committed some massacres and pogroms against Jewish people, and in no way constituted anything that could be called a holocaust or genocide.

Muzaffar wrote an open letter to his friend Garaudy, a convert to Islam, published in Jakarta's New Straits Times, attacking those who criticised him. "It is sad that instead of respecting the quest for truth, instead of showing tolerance for another point of view, the Zionist intelligentsia and their supporters in France have gone on a rampage to smear you and vilify you." This he said, "is the hideous face of Zionism."

Just World Trust claims to advocate freedom of the press, education for Muslim women, and many other moderate social advances in Islamic society. Muzaffar, also a convert to Islam, has a long record of social activism in Malaysia through Aliran Kesedran Negara (National Awareness Movement), which he founded.

In late 1987 he was imprisoned by the Mahathir government, of which he is now on closer terms, under Malaysia's draconian Internal Security Act. He was released in December 1987. Muzaffar was also banned from entering Singapore on the grounds that he interfered in its internal affairs. A Singapore Interior Ministry statement said that Chandra and three others "mounted agitation over the Singapore government's arrests of Marxist conspirators in May/June this year.