It was the second reconciliation talks after the May 5 polls since former Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla, who are close to Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak and opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, acted as an intermediary between both leaders.
A senior PKR leader told The Malaysian Insider that this time, that role was taken over by leader of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, who was in Kuala Lumpur to attend the 2013 Umno International Forum.
‘Khaled met Najib and Anwar separately. After his meeting with Anwar, Khaled had dinner with Najib before returning home,’ said the senior PKR leader.
The source, who also spoke to Meshaal, said the Hamas leader advised both Najib and Anwar that if they were indeed serious about reconciliation, they should forget past wrongs.
Najib met the Hamas leader for the first time when he visited Gaza in January this year, while Anwar met Meshaal early last year in Doha, Qatar.
Meshaal was instrumental in negotiating peace talks between his party and Fatah, a faction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation which retains control of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The senior PKR leader told The Malaysian Insider that he was contacted by a senior Umno official soon after Khaled left Kuala Lumpur.
The GMBDW reported last week Khaled Meshaal had arrived in the capital of Malaysia earlier this week in order to attend the annual conference of the United Malays National Organisation (UNMO), Malaysia’s largest political party. We reported subsequently that Hamas spokesman and UK Muslim Brotherhood leader Dr. Azzam Tamimi was in Malaysia for a series of speaking appearances on a tour that began December 1 and is scheduled through December 8.
Anwar Ibrahim is a Malaysian politician and leader of the opposition PKE Party (People’s Justice Party). Ibrahim was a Deputy Prime Minister in Malaysia under Mahathir bin Mohamad but following increasingly discord between the two men, Ibrahim was accused and convicted of sodomy in 1998 and was jailed until the verdict was over turned in 2004 and he was released from prison. He was re-arrested on the same charges in 2008 but acquitted in 2012 after a two-year trial. Ibrahim has many known ties to the global U.S Muslim Brotherhood including helping to found the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) where he currently serves as a director, serving as a trustee for the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) during the 1970’s and early 1980’s, and appearances at numerous Brotherhood-linked conferences. In 2011, he was a participant in the 2011 U.S.-Islamic World Forum, held in the US for the first time and which included a large number of individuals tied to the Global Muslim Brotherhood as well as their supporters. Media coverage on Ibrahim generally ignores this history which may be explained by a 2008 article from the Malaysian media on how Ibrahim has reinvented himself.
