The day after an investigative piece we had written exposing the fact that Congresswoman and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was going to give the Keynote Address at an upcoming radical Muslim fundraiser, Wasserman Schultz cancelled her speech. Her office claimed that she had never agreed to do the event in the first place, but a newly released statement from the Islamist group’s leader proves that that was not true.
According to announcements which were placed on the website of EMERGE USA last month, Debbie Wasserman Schultz had been scheduled to give the Keynote Address at the group’s annual fundraising banquet, which was to be held in Downtown Fort Lauderdale, at the Marriott Fort Lauderdale North, on April 21st.
This, as was pointed out in our article, ‘Debbie Wasserman Schultz Empowers a Radical Muslim Fundraiser,’ was troubling, because, while EMERGE USA’s name sounds innocuous if not entirely patriotic, the group’s leadership consists of persons who spread bigotry against non-Muslims and who actively support terror-related individuals and organizations who target America and Israel.
The co-founder and spokesman of EMERGE, Khurrum Wahid, has given legal support to what would seem to be a who’s who of accused terrorists in America, including a man who threatened to assassinate President George W. Bush and two South Florida imams who were charged with sending at least $50,000 to the Taliban to murder American troops overseas. As well, Wahid is a former representative of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In 2011, he landed on a U.S. government terrorist watch list.
The Executive Director of EMERGE, Nauman Sabit Abbasi, is the President of Public Relations for the Islamic Foundation of South Florida (IFSF), a radical mosque whose youth leader recently wrote on the internet, "[Y]es, Allah (SWT) has Decreed that we will over-take the World in numbers…"
The Field Coordinator of EMERGE, Laila Abdelaziz, belligerently asked President Barack Obama at a Tampa, Florida town hall meeting to condemn Israel for what she erroneously claimed were “human rights violations against the occupied Palestinian people.”
The co-founder and former Executive Director of EMERGE, Farooq Mitha, has spoken at events sponsored by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an organization that has been named by the U.S. Justice Department as a party to the financing of Hamas, and the Center for American progress (CAP), an Obama-linked group that has been widely condemned for its propagation of anti-Semitism.
The contact for the Wasserman Schultz EMERGE fundraiser was listed on the group’s event flyer as Rasheed Shihada, an individual who posted on his Facebook site a video in support of a leader from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and a rant he [Shihada] authored denouncing Christianity.
Immediately, our information was picked up by a number of media sources, including Fox News and the Drudge Report. According to radio talk show host Dennis Miller, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked a question about it.
Sensing the fallout from being involved in such an event, Wasserman Schultz cancelled her speaking engagement, and all advertisements for the fundraiser were pulled down from EMERGE USA’s website. As confirmation of her cancellation, one of this article’s authors – who happens to be a candidate for Congress against Wasserman Schultz – was told by a staffer of hers that she would no longer be speaking at the function.
But that was not what was told to the media.
Wasserman Schultz’s spokesman, Jonathan Beeton, told Florida’s Sunshine State News, “There was a miscommunication, she is not speaking to the organization. We never agreed to do a fundraiser, nor this event.” Beeton told the Washington Free Beacon the same, word for word.
However, an editorial written by EMERGE USA head Khurrum Wahid, which was printed in the South Florida Sun Sentinel, rebuts the statement made by the Wasserman Schultz camp. According to Wahid, Wasserman Schultz “agreed to speak at the banquet of EMERGE USA” – and then later backed out after what he describes as the “character assassination” of his group took place. [Of course, this alleged character assassination refers to our original investigative piece on this subject.]
For Debbie Wasserman Schultz to fabricate a story about her participation at the EMERGE banquet like she did, she must have considered the issue a very serious one. Indeed, for someone who publicly flaunts her Jewish identity as she does, it cannot help her to be seen as being an assistant fundraiser for a group led by those who appear to have animosity towards Jews and Israel.
Wasserman Schultz should never have agreed to help raise money and be the keynote speaker for such a radical group, and it is unfortunate and disturbing that it took criticism from these authors and others for her to finally decide not to do it. It is even more unfortunate that she would lie about her involvement.
