GENEVA, July 14 – UN Watch today called on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to reprimand a top official in Gaza who is telling reporters to interview a Norwegian doctor and radical Maoist politician who in September 2001 openly supported the “moral right” of Al Qaeda to perpetrate the 9/11 terrorist attacks against thousands of American civilians.
Earlier today, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness reached out to journalists with the following Twitter post: “Great interviewee @ Shifa Hosp Gaza right now Prof Mads Gilbert +4790878740 call him 4 fatality & cas figs and atoms RT”
“It’s an outrage that a supposed UN relief organization – which receives tens of millions of dollars from U.S. and European taxpayers – is promoting a radical politician who has openly supported the murder of American civilians,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch.
“We urge UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to reprimand Mr. Gunness, and to put a stop to the cynical misuse of UN relief funds to promote the Hamas terrorist agenda.”
Dr. Mads Gilbert is well known in Norway as a far-left political activist who, according to Norwegian news reports, openly supports “bloody” revolutions. He joined the Workers’ Communist Party (AKP), now known as the Red party, in the 1970s, and in 2009 ran as the 14th-ranked candidate on the Red party list for elections in Troms. The party calls for revolution to “disarm the bourgeoisie.”
Gilbert provoked a front-page scandal in Norway (see image, right: “Norwegian doctors ADVOCATE TERROR attack” ) when he expressed support for the 9/11 attacks in an interview with Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper, on 30 September 2001.
First the newspaper quotes his support for a colleague’s pro-terrorism position:
I advocate the moral right of the people you call terrorists to attack the United States, as a legitimate response to 25 years of wars of aggression, mines, starvation and embargo, says surgeon Hans Husum, University Hospital of Tromsø. He is supported by physician Mads Gilbert.
Then Gilbert makes his own views crystal clear:
Dagbladet: Do you support a terrorist attack on the United States?
Gilbert: “Terror is a poor weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned.”
Dagbladet: You understand that this will create reactions?
Gilbert: “Yes, that’s to be expected. The white world does not understand that it is possible to see such an act in a different perspective.”