International Freedom Foundation
The International Freedom Foundation (IFF) was an organization established in 1986 in Washington, D.C., self-described as an anti-communist group.
The organization's stated aim was to promote individual and collective freedoms worldwide: freedom of thought; free speech; free association; free enterprise; and, the free market principle. The IFF campaigned against regimes and movements it described as Soviet allies. To achieve its aim the IFF, with offices in London and Johannesburg, sponsored symposia with high-profile speakers such as Henry Kissinger. Among its eight periodicals, the IFF published a monthly newsletter—the Freedom Bulletin—with three editions: International; UK/Europe; and, Republic of South Africa.
Critics have accused it of being funded by apartheid South Africa, which initially used it to portray the African National Congress (ANC) together with its leaders, Oliver Tambo and the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, as terrorists and as sympathetic to Soviet communism. See the articles on the ANC and Mandela on Communist associations.
Leftist Wikipedia accuses the organization of having created support among Republican politicians for South Africa and states that "Had they known that they were effectively working to further the interests of a foreign government, they would have been required under US law to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department." Compare Israel lobby.
The organization has been claimed to have been involved in the 1988 American anti-Communist action film Red Scorpion, taking place in an African country.
In 1992, under pressure from Nelson Mandela, funding for the IFF was withdrawn by President F. W. de Klerk and it closed down the following year.
London UK office
The IFF (UK) published an occasional Freedom Bulletin. The January 1989 edition (no.5, 8 pages) was devoted exclusively to opposing the Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement, which had been signed at the Washington Summit in December 1987. They called for its abandonment and stated that from a Western angle it was appeasement.
The director of the IFF's London office, at 10 Storey's Gate, Westminster, was Marc Gordon (b.1966). On January 31, 1989 in a BBC Radio 4 interview, Gordon praised Western Goals UK for its activities in exposing left-wing political activities of charities, such as Oxfam and Christian Aid. However, as paid agents of the National Party Government in South Africa, which was now quietly paving the way for a Communist Party of South Africa takeover of that country through their proxy, the ANC, they were to turn against the Western Goals because of their support for continuing European government there. In June 1989 the IFF protested against the visit to London of Dr. Andries Treurnicht of the Conservative Party (South Africa), organised by Western Goals. Marc Gordon attacked the WGI and stated that the IFF was [now] against apartheid.[1] He was, however, then accused of wearing T-shirts embossed with the legend "hang Nelson Mandela".
On August 1, during the debate about whether or not the Hong Kong Chinese should be given British passports, Gordon stated that "as regards Hong Kong, the IFF believes human labour should not be subject to restrictions on its movement". By September 25, 1992, Gordon was railing against the Western Goals Institute, and urged the Conservative Party (UK) to expel WGI members[2], a move doubtless assisted by his South African paymasters,[3] In response, WGI's Gregory Lauder-Frost wrote to the Jewish Chronicle on September 25 stating that "the Conservative Party has always been a broad church. However, Marc Gordon's I.F.F.'s support for the importing to our overcrowded island of 3,000,000 Hong Kong Chinese would not, I believe, endear him to the vast majority of grass-roots conservatives."
Gordon was publicly disowned by the UK Conservative Party after he claimed to have gone on a patrol with anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua and was photographed holding an assault rifle.[4]
Gordon later managed, in 1996, without revealing his political past, to get a post with Sir James Goldsmith's Referendum Party, where he was helping to choose candidates. It emerged that Gordon had been Vice-Chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students before it was controversially banned by the then Tory Chairman, Norman Tebbit, in 1987, for "its extremist views".[5]
References
- ↑ The Guardian, June 6, 1989).
- ↑ Jewish Chronicle
- ↑ London Evening Standard, September 11, 1996, p.5).
- ↑ London Evening Standard, September 11, 1996, p.5.
- ↑ London Evening Standard, September 11, 1996, p.5).
- Newsday Sunday July 16, 1995 Dele Olojede (in South Africa) and Timothy M. Phelps (in Washington) Front for Apartheid: Washington-based think-tank said to be part of ruse to prolong power (Dele Olojede, who wrote the Newsday article, was joint winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.)
- Encyclopedia of Associations 1993
