Media Covers for VP Nominee Tim Walz Who Danced with Hitler-Promoting Islamist

Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for the vice presidency, has enjoyed softball coverage of his affiliation with—and praise for— an Islamist imam who celebrated the October 7 massacre and promoted a film that lionized Adolf Hitler.

Aside from a video of Presidential candidate Donald Trump brutally mocking Walz for calling well-known Islamist Asad Zaman a “master teacher,” the governor of Minnesota has not been seriously challenged for his connections to the imam, which he has lamely tried to deny, declaring he has no “personal ties” to the man. It’s not particularly believable given that Zaman serves as the executive director of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota.

Still, the Washington Post has ignored the story, prompting Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of NewsBusters.org to declare that the paper “reads like it’s owned by the Democratic National Committee” (which by the way hasn’t responded to a press inquiry from Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).)

The Washington Post, Graham wrote, “is a Democrat rag, so it can’t touch this.”

Washington Examiner reporter Gabe Kaminsky broke the story in a piece published on Aug. 9, ten days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Kaminsky reported that Walz had appeared in public with Zaman—a Bangladeshi imam who has repeatedly used Facebook to promote antisemitic commentaries—at least five times.

“Across the country, Islamists hungry for government support will surely support Walz as vice president,” said Middle East Forum Islamist Watch director Sam Westrop, who has documented and commented on the Minnesota governor’s ties to Islamists several times over the years.

As troubling as the details are, people shouldn’t expect the story to get much traction in the weeks ahead, warns Dennis Hale, political science professor at Boston College. The fact that Muslims largely vote Democrat protects them from scrutiny from mostly liberal journalists, Hale suggests.

“No one will know about it other than those who read ‘right-wing’ sources,” Hale said, adding that Islamists enjoy significant influence over state politics in Minnesota. “Walz has a lot to answer for, but no one is going to ask him about it. The idea seems to be that you can’t say anything critical of Muslims without being accused of being an anti-Muslim radical, so people just ignore it. [Muslims] vote Democratic, so that’s it.”

Indifference to the story is pronounced in Minnesota, reports Claremont Institute Fellow and prominent Minnesota attorney Scott Johnson, who blogs at Powerline.

“To my knowledge, no one cares, but I judge by media coverage. The local press is cheerleading for Walz,” he told FWI.

The media have also largely ignored another story published by the Washington Examiner documenting how Governor Walz has given more than $2 million of state funds to “an Islamic group that fundraises for a charity linked to an al Qaeda affiliate.” The article has failed to generate much interest on the part of the mainstream media.

“Frankly, as a Muslim, this is hard for me to watch, and I can’t remain silent,” said Dalia Al-Aqidi, a prominent counter-Islamist running as a Republican against U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar in the race for U.S. Representative of Minnesota’s fifth district. “Walz supports those who are responsible directly or indirectly for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East over the last fifty years, and to him, he thinks he’s doing me a favor. It’s sick.” (The Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party [DFL], which is affiliated with the national Democratic Party, did not respond to a request for comment.)

Al-Aqidi, who has also written about Walz’s affiliation with Islamists in Minnesota, says the Democratic Party’s willingness to affiliate with folks like Zaman is rooted in the party’s hyper-focus on identity politics, “which creates divisions in the community as they refuse to see their constituents as individual Americans.”

This obsession, Al-Aqidi said, “leads them to embrace what they see as the leaders of movements who claim to represent a certain group of people. In the case of his and most of Minnesota’s Democrat outreach to Muslims, they choose Muslim Brotherhood front groups and those who actively support the likes of Hamas, al-Qaeda, and other terrorist groups.”

Al-Aqidi is not optimistic that Walz’s affiliation with Zaman will get much traction in the weeks ahead. “But it certainly should have an impact once these stories are told,” she said.

But there’s a good chance the stories will not be told, at least by the Washington Post and its cohorts on the left. The Post keeps telling us that “Democracy Dies in Darkness” even as it dims the lights with its see, hear, and speak no evil coverage of Islamist influence on American politics.