The marketing campaign is in high gear. Tim Walz should be our vice president, our self-appointed moral superiors inform us because he is a guy just like you and me and the fellow grilling hamburgers next door. Not Chuck Schumer photo-op raw meat, either. Walz, the “news” media insists, is the real deal, an Ordinary Joe, even more ordinary than Old Joe Biden. A high school teacher! A football coach! A Marxist authoritarian! Oh, scratch that last one; they won’t be admitting that one until later. Nor is the establishment media talking about his friendships with Muslims who love Hamas.
The Washington Examiner reported Friday that Walz, “on at least five occasions as governor of Minnesota, hosted a Muslim cleric who celebrated Hamas‘s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israel and promoted a film popular among Neo-Nazis that glorifies Adolf Hitler.” The imam whom the Examiner had in mind was Asad Zaman of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, who “said on Oct. 7 of last year that he ‘stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks.’” He has also “used his Facebook page over the years to share official Hamas press releases, blog posts on antisemitic websites slamming Jews, and, in one 2015 instance, a link to a piece on a website for a pro-Hitler film called 'The Greatest Story Never Told.'”
Listen closely now and you can hear leftists all over our unhappy land shouting, “So what?” This is the sort of thing that Democrat politicians do all the time, and Walz himself has done it before. The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday that Walz “spoke at an event for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in 2019, where he rubbed shoulders with an anti-Semitic scholar behind much of the Hamas propaganda on college campuses in the wake of Oct. 7, according to photos from the event.” CAIR top dog Nihad Awad was the one who shot himself in the foot by saying that Hamas’ Oct. 7 jihad massacre made him “happy.” That was too much even for the Biden regime, which summarily dropped CAIR from a White House antisemitism task force.
CAIR had no business being part of that task force in the first place. Back in Nov. 2021, Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, delivered a venomously antisemitic speech in which she told her Muslim audience to “oppose the vehement fascist, but oppose the polite Zionist too."
She warned against even far-left Jewish groups such as the ADL: “We need to pay attention to the Anti-Defamation League. We need to pay attention to the Jewish Federation. We need to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues. We need to pay attention to the Hillel chapters on our campuses because just because they are your friends today, doesn’t mean that they have your back when it comes to human rights.”
That’s not even close to all. CAIR officials have refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.)
Nevertheless, Walz happily appeared at CAIR-Minnesota’s 2019 “Challenging Islamophobia” conference. He has never demonstrated any awareness of the fact that “Islamophobia” is a smear propaganda term designed to intimidate people into thinking it is wrong and “bigoted” to oppose jihad terror and Sharia oppression.
Nor has any leftist “journalist” demanded that Walz disavow “Islamophobia” professor Hatem Bazian, who was also at that conference. Discover the Networks notes that Bazian founded American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), “a major supporter of the pro-Hamas campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Several of AMP’s recent board members and key officials were previously members of, and worked closely with, now-defunct Islamic extremist groups that funded terrorist activities.”
These included direct financiers of Hamas, including the Islamic Association for Palestine “which, until its dissolution in 2004, served as the chief U.S. propaganda arm of Hamas”; the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, “which from 1995-2001 contributed approximately $12.4 million in money, goods, and services to Hamas”; and KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, “whose assets were frozen in 2006 by the U.S. Treasury Department because of its fundraising activities on behalf of Hamas.”
Related: God the Hen, God the Baker: Tim Walz’s ‘Church’ Is About What You’d Expect
Walz’s stolen valor scandal isn’t going away anytime soon, but no one seems concerned that Walz has repeatedly associated with Muslim leaders with known ties to Hamas and other jihad groups. There is a good reason for this: it is nearly twenty-three years since 9/11, and that means that for almost twenty-three years, Americans have been relentlessly and comprehensively indoctrinated with the dogma that Islam is a religion of peace that was hijacked on that fateful day by a tiny minority of extremists, but hey, every religion has them, and any concern about Islamic jihad violence or Sharia oppression women is racist, bigoted, and “Islamophobic.”
In that atmosphere, Walz’s hobnobbing with associates and supporters of jihadis is unlikely to raise many eyebrows, but as Islamic jihadis continue to grow more assertive and emboldened in the West, America’s dad may come to wish he had chosen his friends more carefully.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member