On Tuesday, President Donald Trump gave a speech commemorating the 400th anniversary of the first legislative assembly in Virginia at Jamestown. This historic speech celebrating representative government and condemning slavery was interrupted, however. The heckler shouted, “Mr. President, you can’t send us back, Virginia is our home!” That heckler was none other than Ibraheem Samirah, a Democratic member of Virginia’s House of Delegates, former campaign volunteer for a member of “The Squad,” and a member of anti-Semitic front groups for Hamas.
The disruption seemed rather minor, until it became clear that it was an orchestrated stunt for political reasons.
WATCH: Protester interrupts President Trump during speech in Jamestown: "Mr. President, you cannot send us back. Virginia is our home." https://t.co/n5UPrX1ekU pic.twitter.com/XNWFJ255Vw
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 30, 2019
“I just disrupted the [Trump] speech in Jamestown because nobody’s racism and bigotry should be excused for the sake of being polite. The man is unfit for office and unfit to partake in a celebration of democracy, representation, and our nation’s history of immigrants,” Samirah tweeted after the disruption.
I just disrupted the @realDonaldTrump speech in Jamestown because nobody's racism and bigotry should be excused for the sake of being polite. The man is unfit for office and unfit to partake in a celebration of democracy, representation, and our nation's history of immigrants. pic.twitter.com/0okD7eRVer
— Delegate Ibraheem Samirah (@IbraheemSamirah) July 30, 2019
Samirah served as a campaign official for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
In February, while running for the Virginia House of Delegates, he apologized to the Jewish community for statements comparing Israel to the Ku Klux Klan and for wishing for the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to “burn in hell.”
Yet Samirah remains a vocal supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which inflames anti-Semitism on American college campuses. The group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has harassed Jewish students and students from Israel, denouncing the Jewish state as a “white supremacist state.” The now-delegate was an active member of SJP, as the Washington Free Beacon’s Mikhael Smits reported.
SJP receives funds and logistics from American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), another group of which Samirah is a member. Hatem Bazian, founder and president of AMP and the founder of SJP, has a history of deeply anti-Semitic comments supporting anti-Semitic conspiracies. In 2004, he spoke at a fundraiser for KindHearts, an offshoot of the Holy Land Foundation, a notorious terror-funding network. The Anti-Defamation league traced AMP’s roots to a Hamas propaganda group called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). Internal documents reveal that IAP’s goal was to “increase the financial and the moral support for Hamas” and the outfit sent roughly $3 million per year to Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation.
A 2000 document from the fourth annual IAP convention lists Dr. Sabri Ibrahim Samirah, Delegate Samirah’s father, as chairman of the organization’s board of directors.
Hamas is not just a Palestinian political party, it is also a terrorist organization whose charter explicitly calls for the killing of Jews, not just Israelis.
As for Samirah, he has spoken at multiple AMP conferences, and he spoke alongside Bazian in 2018. In 2017, he pledged “a sizeable portion of my 6 figure salary and future 7 figure income” to AMP. In that Facebook post, he linked to an AMP page warning of “Zionist Jews” trying to take over Jerusalem.
Samirah also stayed in the U.S. illegally, overstaying his student visa. He continued to work while in the U.S. illegally and obtained a new invalid visa. He traveled to Jordan to visit a relative in 2002, and the Department of Homeland Security barred his return on national security grounds.
While abroad, he ran for Jordan’s parliament in 2016. Al Jazeera refers to him as a “leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan.” He has advocated for the Jordanian military to invade Israel, particularly Jerusalem and Hebron.
In 2010, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed him to return to the U.S. on a technicality while the immigration system reviewed his illegal alien status. The decision referred to a “possible (though only, as far as we know, a rumored) link to Hamas.”
After the Washington Free Beacon reported Samirah’s connections to Hamas, Republicans called the delegate out on them. Samirah accused the GOP of “fundraising by saying I support terrorists.” He faulted The Washington Post for citing the claim without approaching him for comment.
The GOP is now fundraising by saying I support terrorists.
I expect that BS from them, but am shocked that @washingtonpost quoted this false @cToddGilbert statement in an article w/o mentioning the clear insinuation.
Worse, they ran an entire story on me w/o giving me a voice. pic.twitter.com/JTaBWb7sDO
— Delegate Ibraheem Samirah (@IbraheemSamirah) August 1, 2019
PJ Media reached out to Samirah for comment but has yet to receive a response.
@IbraheemSamirah would you respond to claims that you are a member of anti-Semitic Hamas front groups? https://t.co/LGvQv1MZyY
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) August 1, 2019
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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