Dr. K.A. Paul (left) with Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. Photo: Courtesy of Global Peace Initiative.
JNS.org – On
a rainy day in Huffman, Texas — on the outskirts of Houston, America’s
fourth-largest city, yet seemingly in the middle of nowhere — I search
for the headquarters of the
Global Peace Initiative (GPI).
The destination plugged into my iPhone’s navigation app takes me to a
cross-bearing building in an otherwise empty grass field. There’s no
parking lot, but I slog through the muddy grass to the door. When nobody
answers, I get back in the car and continue my search for GPI.
Minutes later, I receive a phone call from GPI’s
founder, Dr. Kilari Anand (K.A.) Paul, a man who has been described as “the world’s most popular evangelist” by
The New Republic and “the next Billy Graham” by the
New York Times.
Indeed, Paul tells me, the seemingly deserted building is GPI’s office.
Quite the humble environs for a man who says his charity and peace work
has reached 148 countries, hundreds of thousands of orphans and widows
in need, and the millions of people who have attended his peace rallies.
Global media have reported on how he convinced Liberian dictator
Charles Taylor to resign and persuaded Haitian rebel leader Guy Philippe
to lay down his arms. Also in Paul’s travel log: meetings with late
Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, former Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
After I enter the facility with K.A. Paul, what follows is a
wide-ranging interview with someone who is best described as an
international man of mystery. That man is also staunchly pro-Israel,
which might surprise you given the aforementioned characters he has met
with. His mission last summer: defeat the nuclear deal between Iran and
world powers. His current mission: muster the power of America’s 90
million evangelical Christians to help defeat Democratic contender
Hillary Clinton in the 2016 American presidential election.
“God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference
nowhere,” said Voltaire. Indeed, trying to describe God is like trying
to...
Paul, 52, was born in India and in 1989 first came to Houston, where
he lives when he isn’t busy globetrotting. He calls this year’s
presidential race “the most important election of our lifetime.” Why? He
fears a victory by Clinton, the front-runner, over whomever emerges
from a muddled Republican field. A prominent critic of the George W.
Bush administration’s war in Iraq, Paul backed President Barack Obama in
the 2008 election due to Obama’s opposition of the war. After seeing
Obama’s foreign policy, including secretary of state Clinton’s handling
of the Libya crisis and more recently the Iran deal, Paul is singing a
much different tune on the Democrats.
At the same time, his criticism of political leaders continues to
transcend partisan lines. For example, he blasts Republicans and
Democrats alike for the Iraq war. Former Florida governor and struggling
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, says Paul, is “paying the
price today” due to the war initiated during his brother’s presidency.
“But Jeb Bush was only a governor. Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq
war as a senator. [Vice President] Joe Biden voted for the Iraq war as a
senator….We need to elect an outsider, who never voted for the Iraq war
or the Libya hell, who understands foreign policy…who can hold these
people accountable — Obama and Hillary Clinton — just like Bush is held
accountable because of his brother’s stupid war,” Paul says.
“Therefore,” he continues, “I’m campaigning to these 90 million
evangelicals, to as many as I can reach for the next nine months, to
mobilize rallies, prayer rallies, so that our next president can reverse
the Iran deal and protect the interests of Americans, Israelis, and the
GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) nations.”
Paul has been a state guest of Iran three times and calls Iranian
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif “a good friend.” So why did Paul
spend last summer building a global coalition to oppose the nuclear
deal? He puts it this way: “Why Iran? Why not Sudan?”
In 2010 and 2011, Paul says he spent eight months in Sudan trying to
persuade President Omar al-Bashir to sacrifice 60 percent of the
government’s wealth and 30 percent of its land to the Christian-majority
southern part of the country. Ultimately, Bashir allowed a referendum
for southern Sudan to secede and become an independent country. Paul
laments that Sudan, despite its sacrifice, hasn’t seen the sanctions
relief that America promised the African nation would receive — yet $150
billion in sanctions relief is coming Iran’s way in the nuclear deal.
Though the deal was signed under the watch of current Secretary of
State John Kerry, the Wall Street Journal reported last year that
Hillary Clinton, in her last months as secretary of state, “helped open
the door to…an acceptance that Tehran would maintain at least some
capacity to produce nuclear fuel.” The report cited a “string of
high-level meetings” in 2012 in which “the secretary of state and White
House concluded that they might have to let Iran continue to enrich
uranium at small levels, if the diplomacy had any hope of succeeding.”
“We are not honoring our commitment to lift the sanctions on Sudan,” Paul tells
JNS.org.
“We are lifting sanctions on Iran, which is increasingly becoming more
dangerous than ever before to all the Middle East and the rest of the
world. What does this tell our friends?…Therefore, Hillary Clinton
should not be elected, because she will continue Obama’s policies.”
But Paul’s opposition of Clinton is about more than policy. It’s personal.
Paul says that in August 2011, during Clinton’s time as secretary of
state, he spent 27 days in Libya negotiating with the Gaddafi regime to
accede to America’s demands regarding the Libyan civil war. He describes
Gaddafi, the notorious dictator who was eventually killed in October of
that year, as a “changed man” during the last decade of his life.
“[Gaddafi] was evil. He was a dictator. Ruthless. But he was a
born-again believer, you could say. He did whatever America wanted.
Finally, during the war, he agreed to every condition Hillary Clinton
asked for through her friend, General Wesley Clark, who was on the phone
with me at least two or three dozen times when I was in Libya,” Paul
recalls.
Paul’s team provides me with a letter (click
here to
read it) dated Aug. 19, 2011, from then-Libyan prime minister Baghdadi
al-Mahmoudi to President Obama. Copying Paul and his fellow American
negotiator in Libya, former member of Congress Walter Fauntroy, on the
letter, Mahmoudi writes that Libya, in “joint cooperation with the
United States,” will “work jointly in the newfound spirit of cooperation
between our governments.” According to the letter, Gaddafi was prepared
to “immediately” cease fire in the civil war, give Libyans a chance “to
choose their government and the way of governing based on freedom,” and
agree to the principle that a political solution in Libya would be
reached “without interference” from Gaddafi.
The White House, the State Department, and Clark all did not respond to
JNS.org’s requests for comment on the letter.
Paul says he emailed the letter to Clark, who mailed and faxed it to
the White House and the State Department. He says Clark relayed messages
that Obama and Clinton were both pleased with the letter. But Paul
claims the Obama administration never followed through on a promise to
send a helicopter to Libya to bring Paul and Fauntroy home. Instead,
Paul says that with the help of a CIA operative, he managed to escape
Libya on a 39-hour boat ride to Malta. At the time, media outlets in
Paul’s native India had presumed he was dead.
Yet here Paul is on a rainy day in Texas, speaking with me about his
international adventures, which he continues to undertake despite the
Bush administration’s alleged grounding of his private 747 plane a
decade ago. Today, he says, the plane remains grounded in Tijuana,
Mexico. (Click
here and
here for the most recent documentation of the whereabouts of Paul’s “Global Peace Ambassadors” plane.)
So why does Paul meet with world leaders — dictators and democracy
practitioners alike — and what makes them willing to meet with him? The
evangelist says his success derives from his peace rallies.
“We don’t take money, like every other evangelist or preacher or
rabbi takes,” he says. “We don’t sell books like everybody else sells. I
don’t promote just a religious agenda, but a peace agenda. Therefore,
everybody who has got nothing to lose, who is hungry for peace, comes to
my rallies.”
When “millions of people” attend your rallies, Paul says, you have the ear of presidents and prime ministers.
decades of empirical evidence and past performance. 
