by George Rasley
Recently, 12 pro-Israel organizations signed a letter addressed to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, calling on them to remove Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-5) from the Foreign Affairs Committee after she espoused a series of anti-Semitic tropes.
The Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), a longtime pro-Israel advocacy group, spearheaded the effort. While some of the groups are avowedly conservative, most of the organizations that signed on are either Jewish groups or groups that have close ties to the Jewish community.
The reaction from the Left and from Left-aligned Islamists was swift and vicious.
Emily Kopp, a former press intern for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, used an op-ed in Capitol Hill’s Roll Call newspaper to describe ACT for America and our friends at the Center for Security Policy as “anti-Muslim hate groups” that “peddle anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.” Kopp also accuses ACT for America of having ties to a neo-Nazi, based on disinformation published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Wrote Kopp:
But the coalition behind the letter — described by conservative media to be “leading Jewish organizations” — includes groups that maintain no relationship to the American Jewish community and peddle anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.
One of the groups was once found to have ties to a longtime neo-Nazi.
However, as PJ Media’s Debra Heine documented, ACT for America’s “ties to a longtime neo-Nazi” consist entirely of an incident involving a white nationalist in Batesville, Ark., who tried to host a “March Against Sharia” event in their name in June 2017.
A statement on Act for America’s website at the time read: “Act for America canceled the event as soon as it became aware the organizer is associated with white supremacist groups.” And that is the totality of their ties to neo-Nazis.
Kopp also hit ACT for America’s Brigitte Gabriel for “falsely” claiming that one-fifth of Muslims believe in a violent ideology, and for comparing peaceful Muslims to peaceful Germans during the Nazi regime, calling them “irrelevant.”
The problem for Kopp is that survey after survey has established that large percentages of Muslims do believe violence against non-Muslims is justified.
As Ms. Heine pointed-out in her article, according to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, only 86 percent of Muslims in the United States said that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam “are rarely or never justified.” That means up to 14 percent believe they are either sometimes or frequently justified. And who knows how many American Muslims in the remaining 86 percent believe violence against civilians is sometimes justified, albeit “rarely.” The numbers go up exponentially in countries with larger Muslim populations.
As bad as the trashing of ACT for America and Brigitte Gabriel was, Emily Kopp’s hit on our friends at the Center for Security Policy was even worse.
According to Ms. Kopp, The Center for Security Policy, a nonpartisan think tank founded by our friend Frank Gaffney Jr., is an “anti-Muslim hate group” that “has advocated for U.S. wars in the Middle East stretching back to the September 11, 2001 attacks.”
The Center, claims Kopp, has a history of stoking conspiratorial fears about the Muslim Brotherhood and “creeping Sharia” in order to make their case, according to the SPLC, which classifies the think tank as a hate group.
And Ms. Kopp repeats the slanderous accusations that Frank Gaffney is “Islamophobic and xenophobic,” claiming “Critics say the president’s promotion of fringe anti-Muslim groups with hawkish foreign policy views raises wider questions about the Republican push to unseat Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee.”
Who those critics might be (aside from Ms. Kopp’s former Boss Speaker Nancy Pelosi) remains unsaid in Kopp’s vituperative column.
More to the point, however, is the fact that Kopp does nothing to rebut the research and warnings published by the Center for Security Policy and the concerns expressed in the EMET letter.
As the EMET letter pointed-out:
Rep. Omar’s presence as a keynote speaker to raise funds for Islamic Relief USA, whose parent organization and chapters have documented ties to terrorist organizations, demonstrates that she has learned next to nothing over the last few weeks when she was reprimanded by your [Speaker Pelosi’s] office and by other Democrats for posting ugly, anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and their organizations.
For weeks articles have been published in the United States and abroad warning about Rep. Omar’s upcoming speech before Islamic Relief USA and documenting the group’s numerous ties to terrorist organizations and individuals as well as anti-Semitic views from its own leadership.
But Rep. Omar insisted on continuing to publicly ally herself with Islamic Relief, which only this month was criticized in a leaked Tunisian Commission document for allegedly providing funding to establish “logistical support” for Jihadist terrorists operating on the Libyan-Tunisian border…”
In 2014 Israel, our strongest ally in the Middle East, banned Islamic Relief’s parent organization, stating it was posing as a charity but was funding Hamas, which refuses to recognize the existence of the State of Israel.
UBS, Credit Suissevi and HSBC, all respected international financial institutions, have also closed down bank accounts with Islamic Relief over fears of terrorist financing.
The Middle East Forum (“MEF”), a respected research organization based in Philadelphia, in an exhaustive June 2018 report, detailed Islamic Relief USA’s funding of projects that feature Hamas leaders…
The chairman of Islamic Relief USA’s board of directors is Khaled Lamada. He is the founder of Egyptian Americans for Democracy and Human Rights, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s key lobbying arms in the United States.
In other words, Rep. Omar has publicly allied herself with the anti-American terrorist organizations The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.*
All of this puts us in mind of something that was revealed after the October 25, 1983 invasion of Grenada.
What the Marines found in Grenada is astonishing as David Horowitz put it in his book The Great Betrayal.
The intelligence trove discovered after the invasion of Grenada revealed that Democrats were not just in communication with the communist government there, but that Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums and his staff were actively colluding with it.
Documents seized showed that Dellums had coordinated his domestic opposition to Reagan’s Grenada policy with the communist junta in Grenada, going so far as to provide draft reports for the regime to edit before being published by the House of Representatives.
Horowitz describes the materials found on Grenada by the Marines, including a letter from Dellums’ chief of staff Carlottia Scott. The letter to the communist dictator said Dellums was “really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn’t want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong. . . . The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel.”
The emissary for these pro-communist efforts to undermine America?
Another Democrat, now-Congresswoman Barbara Lee (CA-13). “Another document liberated by the Marines contained the minutes of a [Grenadian] Politburo meeting attended by the Communist dictator and his military command. ‘Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport that was done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes,’” Horowitz documented in The Great Betrayal.
Democrat Rep. Dellums went on to serve as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, complete with the requisite security clearances.
And Barbara Lee?
She succeeded Dellums as Representative for California’s 13th Congressional District and now sits on the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs and the State and Foreign Operations subcommittees of the powerful Appropriations Committee and employed Awan Abid as an IT professional.
Democrats have a history of placing anti-Americans and potential security leaks on sensitive committees, and they have a long history of abusing classified intelligence, leaking and in some cases giving it to our enemies: You can start with Communists like Alger Hiss and draw a straight line to Rep. Ron Dellums giving classified material to the Communist rulers of Grenada and from there to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s potential for passing information along to America’s Islamist enemies, with whom she shares an obvious ideological commitment.
We don’t expect Speaker Pelosi or Chairman Engle to remove Omar from her sensitive position – she’s there because they want her there – and the reaction to the EMET letter is just another reminder that telling the truth about Islam to Democrats will always get you in trouble.
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George Rasley is editor of Richard Viguerie’s ConservativeHQ.com and is a veteran of over 300 political campaigns. A member of American MENSA, he served on the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, as Director of Policy and Communication for former Congressman Adam Putnam (FL-12) then Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, and as spokesman for Rep. Mac Thornberry former Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Photo “Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib” by Ilhan Omar.
