Toxic cargo

Earlier today, as John reported below, Israeli troops boarded the Rachel Corrie, an Irish vessel participating in the “Freedom Flotilla,” and took it to Ashdod to have its cargo inspected before it is forwarded to Gaza. Fortunately, there was no violence.
Before this non-incident fades, though, I want to add one footnote. This morning, in its report that the Rachel Corrie was headed towards the blockade, the Washington Post noted that the boat’s passengers included “an Irish Nobel peace laureate, a former U.N. diplomat, and a best-selling Malaysian author. What an illustrious passenger list!
But let’s enlist Jay Nordlinger to help us look behind these mini-bios. The Nobel peace laureate is Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976 for opposing the violence in Northern Ireland. Nordlinger describes her as a worthy winner. He adds, however, that Maguire is an “old anti-Israel hand” who has accused Israel of ethnic cleansing.
No surprise there. But Maguire is also rabidly anti-American, so much so that she vociferously opposed awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama on the grounds that “giving this award to the leader of the most militarized country in the world, which has taken the human family against its will to war, will be rightly seen by many people around the world as a reward for his country’s aggression and domination.”
What about the “former U.N. diplomat?” He turns out to be Denis Halliday, who was in charge of the U.N.’s corrupt and cynical Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Halliday resigned from that post, not on the grounds that the program was enriching Saddam Hussein, but on the theory that the U.N. sanctions were “genocide.”
The Malaysian author is Matthias Chang Wen Chieh, a crackpot anti-semite (here I rely on my own internet research). His “best-sellers,” available in caves throughout portions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, are “Future FastForward: The Zionist Anglo-American Empire Meltdown”, “Brainwashed for War, Programmed to Kill: The Zionist Global Agenda” and “The Shadow Money-Lenders and the Global Financial Tsunami.” Chang’s ideas have been promoted in this country by the loathsome Cynthia McKinney.
Chang was an adviser to then Prime Minister Mahathir when the latter delivered his infamous speech to the 2003 Islamic Summit Conference. In that speech Mahathir accused the Jews of world domination and oppression of the world’s Muslims. Chang is also said to have been behind a visit of a delegation of Holocaust deniers and “9/11 truth” advocates to Malaysia in 2006.
When he isn’t raving about Jewish conspiracies, Chang is a lawyer. His accomplishments in this field apparently include being held in contempt of court based on his conduct in a defamation case brought against American Express. Chang was sentenced to a month in jail.
Did Washington Post writers Janine Zacharia and Glenn Kessler confirm that Chang is a “best-selling” author? Did they know the toxic nature of his “best-sellers”? If not, did they investigate? Or were they content to portray Chang in a positive light, based presumably on the line they were fed by the anti-Israelis who organized the flotilla, without asking questions?
This much is clear: if the Post had provided any of the information provided above, its readers would have viewed the Rachel Corrie’s passengers, and probably the expedition in general, less favorably than they did after reading the Post’s account.