WASHINGTON, D.C.– The White House hosted Wajahat Ali at its Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Summit on Wednesday. Ali is an Al Jazeera host who appears to have strong sympathies for the Muslim Brotherhood.
Wajahat Ali was not on a list of attendees provided to Breitbart News by a White House official. However, Ali claimed multiple times on social media that he was in attendance and posted pictures of the CVE summit on his Twitter feed.
He is currently the co-host of Al Jazeera America’s Television show The Stream. Al Jazeera, known for its endless praise of the Muslim Brotherhood and fierce criticism of the State of Israel, is owned by the Qatari ruling family and is based in Doha. In 2001, a New York Times reporter found that the Doha studio was filled with silhouettes glorifying the deceased Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden. In 2013, 22 members of Al Jazeera’s Egyptian Bureau resigned abruptly after complaining that management would force them to report with a heavy pro-Muslim Brotherhood bias. Reuters has previously described one of Al Jazeera’s owners as a “bankroller of Arab Spring revolts in alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks as its goal world domination under a Sunni Islamic caliphate, sees itself as an ideological ally of Ali’s. IkhwanWeb, the Brotherhood’s official website, frequently reposts Ali’s writings. At Ali’s blog, “Goatmilk: An intellectual playground,” he writes reports castigating Israel and promoting his far-left worldview.
While he was in college, Wajahat Ali was a board member of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), which has been described as an “incubator for radicalism” and “gateway to jihad.” The MSA was established by members of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1963. Its most famous alumni include Al Qaeda mastermind Anwar al Awlaki and former MSA president Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was sentenced to 23 years in prison for financing terrorism.
While working for the Center for American Progress in 2011, Ali was listed as the lead author for a paper titled, “Fear, Inc. The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America.” Ali names anti-jihad fighters such as Frank Gaffney, Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes as “scholars” in the “Islamophobia network.” The “validators” of “Islamophobia” include Dr. Zuhdi Jasser and Walid Phares, and its “activists” are Brigitte Gabriel, Pamela Geller, and David Horowitz, according to Ali.
Ali’s “Fear, Inc.” was largely debunked after anti-Jihad activists found that FBI Hate Crime statistics completely disproved the claim that “Islamophobia” was on the rise in America. Year after year, FBI Hate Crime statistics show that Jews are almost five times more likely to be victims of anti-religious hate crimes than Muslims.
He once described the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) — a group that federal officials had accused of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas — as a “highly-respected” organization. Some former members of HLF now sit in federal prison after being charged with terrorism financing. In the article, Ali described now-deported terrorist Sami Al-Arian, who was a leader of Islamic Jihad in the U.S., as “one of the earliest victims of the ‘war on terror,’” and linked to a site that solicited donations for Al-Arian’s defense fund.
Ali is a fierce critic of the State of Israel. He has promoted the anti-Semitic expression “Israel firster,” and believes that the U.S.-Israel alliance is one of the main drivers for worldwide terrorism.
In 2007, Ali interviewed “anti-Zionist” professor Norman Finkelstein in the anti-Semitic publication Counterpunch. In the back and forth, the two discussed “The Holocaust Industry,” and how the Holocaust is supposedly “used to shield and deflect legitimate criticism of Israel.”
In 2008, Ali interviewed John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the book The Israel Lobby. Renowned Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz described the book as one that will be “used by overt anti-Semites to validate their paranoid claims of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”