WarSclerotic

Could a Radical Israel Basher Soon Head the Democratic Party?, Front Page Magazine, Joseph Klein, November 16, 2016

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) is the leading contender to head up the Democratic National Committee. In announcing his candidacy for the position, Ellison said, “When voters know what Democrats stand for, we can improve the lives of all Americans, no matter their race, religion, or sexual orientation.”

Ellison has the support of the progressive wing of the party, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the so-called establishment types such as Senator Chuck Schumer.

What would a Democratic Party led by Rep. Ellison really look like? One need look no further than Rep. Ellison’s own statements, associations and actions. Under Ellison’s leadership, the Democratic Party will continue to evolve into a pro-Islamist party that helps advance the stealth jihad agenda, and a party that moves away from its traditional support of our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel.

Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, has a past history of working actively on behalf of the anti-Semitic firebrand Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. In 1995, writing as Keith X Ellison, he published a column for Insight News, which praised Farrakhan as “a role model for black youth” and denied that Farrakhan was an anti-Semite. In 1997, Ellison defended a statement by Joanne Jackson of the Minnesota Initiative Against Racism, who was reported to have said that “Jews are among the most racist white people I know.”

When Ellison first ran for Congress, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), provided his support at a fund raiser in Minneapolis for Ellison. Ellison in turn has spoken at CAIR fundraising events. He also defended CAIR against credible charges that CAIR was trying to infiltrate staff offices tied to committees on the judiciary, homeland security and intelligence. At CAIR banquets in late 2008, Ellison urged CAIR supporters to seek jobs in the then incoming Obama administration.

Some of Ellison’s donors have “a history of Muslim Brotherhood connections,” according to Campus Watch. The Minneapolis branch of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Muslim American Society reportedly paid for Ellison’s pilgrimage to Mecca for the Hajj in 2008.

Ellison is not interested in hearing a diversity of views from moderate Muslims such as M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, who believe that reform is needed within Islam today. Indeed, Ellison accused Jasser of speaking like those allegedly turncoat blacks “who would seek to ingratiate themselves with powerful people in the white community and would there turn them on the rest of us and give license to attack us all. Now is somebody going to snatch my 13-year-old daughter’s hijab off, call her a horrible name, spit on her because of something that you said, Dr. Jasser, I worry about that.”

Ellison’s example of a good role model for a dedicated Islamist appears to be Hamza Yusuf, president and chairman of the Zaytuna Institute in California. Ellison lauded Yusuf as a respected religious authority who had converted to Islam. Ellison’s role model called Judaism a “most racist religion,” and said just two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on our homeland, “This country [America] unfortunately has a great…tribulation coming to it. And much of it is already here, yet people are too illiterate to read the writing on the wall.”

As Robert Spencer, the author of Stealth Jihad, has just written, the same media that are falsely claiming President-elect Trump’s choice to serve as his chief strategist, Steven K. Bannon, is a white supremacist and anti-Semite are “hailing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) for announcing his candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee – despite Ellison’s very real links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two groups that are outdone by no one in anti-Semitism.”

In addition, one wonders why the more so-called establishment Democrats, in particular the likely next Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a strong supporter of Israel, would not be more troubled by Ellison’s virulently anti-Israel positions.

Ellison has called for the cut off of military aid to Israel. His opposition to supporting Israel with any funding for military purposes even extended to the purely defensive Iron Dome. His cockeyed justification for not even backing an effective means to destroy incoming rockets launched by Hamas from Gaza before they can reach civilian population centers in Israel was that to do so could undermine negotiation of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. “Because a cease-fire is what we should prioritize now,” Ellison said when asked to explain his vote on Meet the Press. “A cease-fire protects civilians on both sides — it doesn’t just say, ‘We’re only concerned about people on one side.’”

Ellison also wrote an op-ed article for the Washington Post in which he called for “an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Thus, for the next possible chairman of the Democratic Party, cutting off Israel’s ability to defend itself with the Iron Dome, together with pressuring Israel to remove all barriers to the import into Gaza of sophisticated rockets from Iran and elsewhere for Hamas to use against Israeli civilians, represents what Democrats should stand for.

Ellison has also made himself an ally of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against Israel, and he has helped legitimize them through participating in their programming. For example, in July 2016, Ellison participated in a panel discussion co-sponsored by The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, one of the largest BDS operations in the US. Ellison has been at the top of that anti-Israel organization’s “House Hall of Fame.” It should be no surprise that, as Salon reported on June 2, 2016, “Rep. Keith Ellison shared a photo on Twitter…that refers to Israel’s illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories as apartheid.”

Finally, with respect to the issue of Syrian refugees, Ellison did not think that President Obama’s decision to admit 10,000 Syrians during the last fiscal year was good enough. Shortly before Obama announced his ramp up decision, Ellison had written a letter to the president stating, “Now, more than ever, we need to live up to our history by increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed to resettle in the United States.” After the president announced his decision to admit 10,000 more Syrian refugees in just one year, Ellison commented, “Ten thousand is not enough. Aren’t we the people who say, ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’? We must do more for families who are not safe in their own homeland.”

Not on President-elect Trump’s watch if there is any potential danger of admitting jihadist terrorists. With Trump intent on curbing the admission of more Syrian refugees until we get a handle on who they really are, one can imagine how Ellison, as head of the Democratic National Committee, will push his open borders policy for Syrian refugees to the top of his party’s agenda, irrespective of the risks to the American people.

If the Democrats do end up selecting Rep. Keith Ellison as the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, they will be elevating a radical Islamist and Israel basher. Contrary to his pitch on Meet the Press last Sunday, his record does not demonstrate how he would successfully lead his party’s effort to “make working America know that the Democratic party is absolutely on their side.” To the contrary, his selection will risk further alienation of a vast portion of Americans who are convinced – correctly so – that the party they had once supported has abandoned them.