Tlaib Campaign Events Were Organized by Accused Jihad Financiers
Tlaib Campaign Events Were Organized by Accused Jihad Financiers
What did you expect?
By Robert Spencer
Imagine if a sitting member of the House of Representatives had had campaign events organized by alleged financiers of the Ku Klux Klan. He or she would already have resigned in disgrace. But Rashida Tlaib won’t even be asked about this: the Washington Examiner reported Monday that “two men who held key positions at nonprofit groups that were found liable in a Hamas terror financing scheme helped organize campaign fundraising events for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in 2018.” Really, is anyone surprised? This is what Michigan’s 13th congressional district elected that year and reelected in 2020. This is, apparently, what Michigan’s 13th congressional district wants.
This all goes back to the notorious Holy Land Foundation trial, in which a large number of the major Muslim organizations in the United States were named unindicted co-conspirators in efforts to funnel funds to Hamas. Tlaib’s campaign event organizers, according to the Examiner, “were associated with a network of nonprofit groups that were found liable by a federal jury in 2004 for financing the terrorist slaying of an American teenager, David Boim, at a bus stop in the West Bank in 1996. A federal judge ordered the three groups to pay Boim’s parents a $156 million judgment for funding Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.”
However, the courtroom victory was fleeting: “the groups — the Holy Land Foundation, the American Muslim Society, and the Islamic Association for Palestine — never paid up. They shut down shortly after they were ordered to pay the landmark judgment to the Boim family. The Holy Land Foundation ultimately had its monetary assets seized by the United States, and five of its leaders were sentenced to decades in prison in 2008, for providing material support to Hamas.”
Rafeeq Jaber had been president of both the American Muslim Society and the Islamic Association for Palestine. Jaber “testified that the two groups, while under his control, worked to ‘promote [Holy Land Foundation] in every way we can’ and also distributed pro-Hamas documents, including an August 2001 editorial that advocated martyrdom operations and the killing of Jewish people.”
If you think that today, in the America that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their henchmen have made, a man who openly supported a group that the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization would have no entrée into American politics at any level, think again: “Jaber was identified as a member of the “Hosting Committee” for a Tlaib campaign fundraiser in July 2018, according to a flier posted on Facebook. The event was paid for by Tlaib’s congressional campaign, the flier stated. Jaber was also filmed sitting in the front row of an intimate Tlaib campaign fundraising event in March 2018, footage of the event uploaded to Facebook shows.” Consider also the fact that this is all coming to light now, four years later. When it actually happened in 2018, no one cared. Someone must have known who Rafeeq Jaber was. No one cared.
Nor was Jaber alone. “The second Tlaib campaign organizer, Salah Sarsour, helped raise money for the Islamic Association for Palestine and the Holy Land Foundation around the time of Boim’s killing and, in one case, allegedly wrote checks from his business’s bank account to funnel money to a Hamas militant….Salah Sarsour also played an active role in raising funds for the Holy Land Foundation ‘that is actually for HAMAS,’ a 2001 FBI memorandum stated.”
Nonetheless, Salah Sarsour “co-hosted a fundraising event for Tlaib’s campaign on July 28, 2018, according to a flier posted to Facebook. The event was ‘paid for by Rashida Tlaib for Congress,’ the flier stated. He then appeared in multiple photos with Tlaib at the fundraiser. Tlaib reacted to a Facebook post containing three photos of her posing with Salah Sarsour at the fundraiser with a heart symbol from her personal Facebook account.”
Once again, no one cared. This was four years ago. Someone, and likely many people, who saw the photos of Sarsour with Tlaib must have known about Salah Sarsour’s past and links to Hamas. But given Tlaib’s record since she has been in Congress, why would that have bothered anyone involved with her campaign?
Rashida Tlaib will be reelected in November 2022, making it clear that Michigan’s 13th congressional district, as it is currently constituted after years of mass migration from Islamic lands, has no problem with any of this at all. Does anyone?
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.