I wonder if the wingnuts have a problem with Paul Wolfowitz dating a Muslim woman and inserting her into the State Department. After all, if Muslims are the modern day communists, then Shaha Riza must be the latter day Alger Hiss. Right? Shouldn’t Dick Cheney team up with Norm Coleman or something and throw a hissy fit about Islamic fellow travelers and Islamic infiltrators in the State Department?
On to the former official: World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who until 2005 was deputy secretary of defense and a chief architect of the calamitous Iraq war. Not that Wolfowitz had much credibility left, after predicting before the war that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as “liberators” and that the cost of the war would be mostly defrayed by Iraq’s oil revenue.
Now we learn that when he took over at the World Bank, Wolfowitz personally dictated the terms of an agreement under which his girlfriend — Shaha Riza, a longtime World Bank employee — would be detailed temporarily to the State Department and receive generous pay raises. By the end of Wolfowitz’s five-year term, Riza will be making $244,960 a year. That’s considerably more than the salary of her nominal boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — and Rice has to pay income taxes, whereas Riza and other World Bank employees do not.
Who’s the modern day Whittaker Chambers? Paging Joe Klein. Joe Klein, please report to the House Un-American Activities Committee.
naaah, I think Glenn Beck should interview her.
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Village Voice Sept. 22, 2005 – Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz‘s Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she’ll be working with Dick Cheneys daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau.
That’s the word from one of my moles in the World Bank. This significant assignment — a hardened link between the money of the World Bank, which is supposed to focus on poverty, and the neocons’ aims of trying to salvage their privatization plans for Iraq — has not be reported anywhere else, to my knowledge, and I see no word of it on the World Bank website either.
This new loan by the World Bank is strictly from hunger, and it’s sure to do nothing to help us in the Arab world. Wolfowitz’s girlfriend and Cheney’s daughter, in charge together of the U.S. State Department’s Near East bureau? W.B. Staffer One, as I’ve referred to this particular source, copied me on a September 16 internal memo from Christiaan J. Poortman, the W.B.’s vice president for Middle East and North Africa (MENA, in bank parlance), that says in part:
The Bank has received a request from the US State Department for the secondment of Shaha Riza — on external service — to the Near East Affairs Office of Partnership Initiative. In accepting this assignment Shaha will be responsible for setting up and managing an International Multilateral Foundation that will support reform in the MENA region.
I have agreed to this request which will allow Shaha to continue her work with civil society, complementing our own work on the reform agenda of our partners in the region. Shaha’s assignment will be effective September 19, 2005. Please join me in wishing Shaha the best in her new assignment.
Shaha Riza’s new job – truth, not snark!
≈ Cross-posted from my diary —
Wolfowitz Still Not Loved at World Bank ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."U.S. tells Europeans it awaits World Bank board
sorry. I know this is a significant matter, but I just can’t get past the title of this diary. The idea creeps me out.
How do you know Shaha Riza is a Muslim?
Oh…so you want wingnuts to consider the possibility of a lapsed Muslim? That would be a sign of progress…I admit.
In fact, I know quite a lot of what you call “lapsed Muslims” or even Muslim-born atheists…
And you didn’t answer my question…
Of course you do. So do I. But don’t try to explain that to a wingnut. If you didn’t realize it, this post is pure tongue-in-cheek. I have no idea whether she is a believer or not.
OK, sorry for the misunderstanding. I am a little sensitive on this subject…
Shaha Riza’s biographical information gives us a great deal of information about her education and so forth, but does not explicitly state that she is Moslem.
It seems reasonable to assume that someone with Ms. Riza’s background–born in Tripoli, Libya, to a Libyan father and Syrian-Saudi mother, then grew up in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom–would be of the Moslem faith, but it’s not necessarily so.
However, it’s been reported in a number of London papers that Shaha Riza is a “Moslem woman”.
However, that’s like calling me a “Catholic man” (I’m a bad Catholic who hasn’t taken Communion in 15 years). That tells us what, exactly, that is helpful to understanding this situation?
To me, it’s irrelevant that Ms. Riza is a Moslem or a Scientologist or an atheist.
Simple fact is, Wolfowitz is a nepotist who has abused the power and influence as President of the World Bank to get his mistress a cushy, highly paid job. The hell of it is, Ms. Riza, who is fluent in several languages and is a graduate of the London School of Economics, could easily have landed a comparable position on her own merits. Say what you will, Ms. Riza’s not an airhead, but a cosmpolitan, accomplished person.
Ms. Riza’s ethnicity or religion might be an interesting “hook” to the story, but really, would Wolfowitz’s actions be worse or better if Ms. Riza was a Swedish Lutheran?