TEL AVIV – The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Los Angeles compared “apartheid” Israel to Nazi Germany in a speech he gave to students at the University of California, Irvine on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day last Wednesday.
As part of its “Anti-Oppression Week,” the Muslim Student Union invited Hussam Ayloush to speak to students; during the Q&A section, a pro-Israel member of the audience, Jonathan Elkhoury, challenged Ayloush, asking him how he could call himself a human rights activist while his organization has supported Hamas, a designated terror group.
“As a person who advocates for human rights,” Elkhoury asked, “how do you actually stand in support of a terrorist organization that actually violates human rights of its own people [including] terminating riots and demonstrations by the Palestinians in Gaza who were actually demonstrating for their own freedom from their leadership?”
Ayloush, a Democratic Party delegate, answered, “I unequivocally, unequivocally stand by the Palestinians.”
After a back and forth with Elkhoury, Ayloush refused to answer the question about his support of Hamas, saying only, “I don’t like the question.” He went on to say that he is not a Palestinian and has never visited “Palestine,” although he “would love to, once it’s liberated.”
He called for Palestinians to have the right to return to their ancestral homes in Israel, rationalizing, “If Jews can go back after 2,000 years of being away, then Palestinians can.”
Elkhoury pressed Ayloush, asking him how Israel was supposed to make peace with the Palestinian leadership when, in Ayloush’s own words, “Hamas and Fatah are not the issue.”
Ayloush responded, “Israel doesn’t need to speak to anybody to end this occupation, to end this apartheid.”
“Did the South African regime need to speak to anybody to end its racism? Did the German Nazi government need to speak to anyone to end its Nazism?”
Another pro-Israel audience member interrupted, noting that once again Ayloush was comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
Elkhoury is a Lebanese Christian who became an Israeli citizen after fleeing Lebanon. Elkhoury now fights anti-Zionist activities on U.S. college campuses with Reservists on Duty (ROD), a group that combats BDS and the demonization of Israel.
ROD’s deputy director Yair Eliash slammed Ayloush’s speech, charging the CAIR director with revealing “deeply embedded anti-Semitism.”
“On the one hand, his lecture hit all the right buzz words, such as ‘human rights’ and ‘fighting for justice,’ but on the other hand he refused to condemn Hamas, regardless of its systematic human rights violations,” Eliash told Breitbart News. “He also compared Israel to Nazis, an outrageous and false claim and one that does a great injustice to all those millions who suffered at the hands of a genocidal regime.”
“Anti-Semitism, whether by white supremacists or by the various ‘Palestinian Justice’ organizations, is wrong, ugly, and should be entirely condemned,” he added.
The CAIR branch of Greater Los Angeles, headed by Ayloush, was where Rep. Ilhan Omar recently gave a keynote address in which she referred to the September 11 terror attacks as a day in which “some people did something” and suggested that President Donald Trump was to blame for the recent terror attack against Muslims in New Zealand.
In November of last year, the Zionist Organization of America demanded that Ayloush be fired from CAIR for calling for the “termination” of the Jewish state, and comparing Israel to Iran.
“Iran’s regime calling Israel a ‘cancerous tumor’ is like the pot calling the kettle black. All the people of that region will be better off once both murderous regimes are terminated,” Ayloush tweeted.
Ayloush in the past coined a term for Israelis as “zionazis,” and accused American citizens of joining the IDF, an army that commits “war crimes.”
“ZOA thus calls on CAIR to immediately fire radical Islamist murder-inciting Hussam Ayloush and for the Democratic party to immediately remove Ayloush’s delegate credentials,” the pro-Israel group said in a statement at the time.
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