Now that Congress has been in session for several weeks, its two Islamist members have had plenty of time to get caught associating with open anti-Semites. Indeed, early in the month, Representative Rashida Tlaib’s campaign fundraising officer, Maher Abdel-qader, was exposed for sharing multiple anti-Semitic sentiments on Facebook.
For example, in January 2018, he posted an anti-Semitic video that claimed modern Jews aren’t actually Jewish, and secretly control the media. The video, which described Jews as “satanic,” also questioned whether 6 million Jews actually died in the Holocaust. A Daily Caller article shows screenshots for many of his other anti-Semitic posts (although many of them appear to have been deleted), but Tlaib did not comment on her staffer’s statements.
So, we asked the tolerance-touting Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for comment. CAIR followed in Tlaib’s footsteps and refused to condemn Abdel-qader’s posts.
Later in the month, we exposed Representative Ilhan Omar’s planned speaking engagement with Yousef Abdallah, who was widely criticized in 2017 after we found he had expressed violently anti-Semitic ideas on his social media accounts. Abdallah, who serves as Islamic Relief USA’s “operations manager,” shared a “very beautiful” modernized version of a Palestinian folk story about a ‘resistance hero’ named Zharif al-Tawl, who took revenge against Jewish “gangs” - which had purportedly attacked a Palestinian village - by providing guns to “kill more than 20 jews” and “fire rockets at Tel Aviv.”
Although Abdallah was removed from the event speaker’s roster, Omar did not issue comment on his anti-Semitism, or the fact that he remains employed by Islamic Relief USA despite his multiple bigoted indiscretions. Moreover, she apparently appeared at the event as planned.
We asked CAIR-National, as well as CAIR-Florida and CAIR-Minnesota, for comment on Abdallah’s sentiments, and on Islamic Relief’s decision to keep him on staff. We also asked each of the three branches for comment on Representative Omar’s choice to participate in fundraising for an organization that evidently tolerates anti-Semitic outbursts from its own employees.
Though CAIR enthusiastically condemns every instance of anti-Muslim hate (whether real or imagined) it can find, Islamist hate is evidently beyond the scope of CAIR’s concern. As usual, all three CAIR branches—intertwined as the organization is with Omar and Islamic Relief USA—refused to condemn their friends’ bigotry. (Though, CAIR officials also made sure to defend Omar’s recent controversial claims that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee buys congressional influence as “not anti-Semitic.”)
Of course.
