Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), that most charming and patriotic of politicians, linked to Hamas? Inconceivable, no? No: the Washington Examiner reports that “two men who held key positions at nonprofit groups that were found liable in a Hamas terror financing scheme helped organize campaign fundraising events for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in 2018.”
What’s surprising about this is not that it happened: anyone who has paid attention to Tlaib’s public statements and actions over the years knows that this is just the sort of thing we should expect from her. What is surprising is that all this happened four years ago and only now has anyone taken any notice; apparently we are so accustomed to Leftist politicians hobnobbing with supporters of terrorist groups that this just wasn’t news.
Tlaib’s campaign event organizers, according to the Examiner, “were associated with a network of nonprofit groups that were found liable by a federal jury in 2004 for financing the terrorist slaying of an American teenager, David Boim, at a bus stop in the West Bank in 1996. A federal judge ordered the three groups to pay Boim’s parents a $156 million judgment for funding Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Getting a judgment was one thing, however, and getting payment was quite another: “the groups — the Holy Land Foundation, the American Muslim Society, and the Islamic Association for Palestine — never paid up. They shut down shortly after they were ordered to pay the landmark judgment to the Boim family. The Holy Land Foundation ultimately had its monetary assets seized by the United States, and five of its leaders were sentenced to decades in prison in 2008, for providing material support to Hamas.”
One of Tlaib’s big boosters was Rafeeq Jaber, who was “identified as a member of the ‘Hosting Committee’ for a Tlaib campaign fundraiser in July 2018, according to a flier posted on Facebook. The event was paid for by Tlaib’s congressional campaign, the flier stated. Jaber was also filmed sitting in the front row of an intimate Tlaib campaign fundraising event in March 2018, footage of the event uploaded to Facebook shows.” As it happens, Jaber wasn’t your average campaign financier; he had been president of two of the groups that had been held liable in the Boim judgment, the American Muslim Society and the Islamic Association for Palestine. Jaber “testified that the two groups, while under his control, worked to ‘promote [Holy Land Foundation] in every way we can’ and also distributed pro-Hamas documents, including an August 2001 editorial that advocated martyrdom operations and the killing of Jewish people.”
Related: Why Do So Many Top Democrats Have No Problem Associating With a Virulent Anti-Semite?
Today we live in the America that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their henchmen have made, and it is an America in which a man who openly supported a group that the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization associated with a prominent Congressional candidate and worked on her campaign, and no one batted an eye.
Jaber wasn’t the only one, either. “The second Tlaib campaign organizer, Salah Sarsour, helped raise money for the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation around the time of Boim’s killing and, in one case, allegedly wrote checks from his business’s bank account to funnel money to a Hamas militant.…Salah Sarsour also played an active role in raising funds for the Holy Land Foundation ‘that is actually for HAMAS,’ a 2001 FBI memorandum stated.”
Despite this, Salah Sarsour “co-hosted a fundraising event for Tlaib’s campaign on July 28, 2018, according to a flier posted to Facebook. The event was ‘paid for by Rashida Tlaib for Congress,’ the flier stated. He then appeared in multiple photos with Tlaib at the fundraiser. Tlaib reacted to a Facebook post containing three photos of her posing with Salah Sarsour at the fundraiser with a heart symbol from her personal Facebook account.”
Just as was the case with Rafiq Jaber, no one cared about Salah Sarsour’s association with Rashida Tlaib, despite his links to Hamas. Nor is this an issue even now that it has all come to light. One thing is certain: Rashida Tlaib will be reelected in November 2022, making it clear that Michigan’s 13th congressional district, as it is currently constituted after years of mass migration from Islamic lands, has no problem with any of this at all. Does anyone? Imagine if a sitting member of the House of Representatives had had campaign events organized by alleged financiers of the Ku Klux Klan. He or she would already have resigned in disgrace. But Rashida Tlaib won’t even be asked about this.
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