Former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat turned 2008 Green Party presidential candidate, has never quite been able to avoid association with anti-Semitism.
Her father, former Georgia State Rep. Billy McKinney, had to resign from her 1996 campaign after he described his daughter's opponent as "a racist Jew." In 2002, Billy McKinney was back in the spotlight for an interview he gave about her campaign in which he said, "Jews have bought everybody. Jews. J. E. W. S." Even the night of her 2006 loss was marred by video of a supporter blaming Jews for the defeat and making anti-Semitic remarks to reporters.
Still, that pales in comparison to what the Southern Poverty Law Center says McKinney's been doing lately -- namely, associating with some particularly nasty anti-Semites, even Holocaust deniers.
In the latest issue of the SPLC's Intelligence Report, Rob Waters writes:
In March of this year, she attended a conference in London on the Gaza crisis organized by a foundation established by Mahathir Mohamad, who was prime minister of Malaysia from 1981 to 2003 and has a long history of anti-Jewish rhetoric. In a 1970 book, Mahathir wrote that "Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them financial control of Europe" and that Jews "are not merely hook-nosed, but understand money instinctively." In a 2003 speech at an international summit of Islamic leaders, he said: "Today, the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy to avoid persecution and gain … control of the most powerful countries."
McKinney commented about the London conference in two postings on the Green Party's website in which she praised Mahathir ("one of my heroes") and also a man named David Pidcock, whom she called "my London friend." A British-born convert to Islam, Pidcock is the author of an extensive collection of conspiracy-laden anti-Semitic works, including the 1992 work Satanic Voices Ancient & Modern, which blames most of the world's current and ancient problems on a centuries-old conspiracy whose participants include Freemasons, Illuminati, "Luciferian Zionists," the Rockefeller family, big oil companies and the Council on Foreign Relations ....
At the conference, McKinney was photographed with Pidcock and Michele Renouf, a former model and socialite who is considered one of Britain's leading Holocaust-denial activists.
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