Several anti-Israel extremist groups are planning an event Wednesday morning in support of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), including a Muslim and a Jewish group that both have controversial records on terrorism.
Omar’s most recent antisemitic remarks, accusing pro-Israel Americans of “allegiance” to a foreign power, came after she had been forced to apologize last month for other, similar remarks.
In response to criticism from Jewish groups, Democratic leaders have planned to hold a vote on a resolution condemning antisemitism on Wednesday.
But some on the left — including Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), who has made similar remarks — are backing Omar.
The event, a press conference to announce a letter of support for Omar, is billed as a “Coalition of Muslim, Jewish Groups,” and was announced Tuesday via a news release from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
CAIR has claimed in the past that American foreign policy is partly to blame for terrorism against Americans. In December 2015, the organization offered legal assistance to the family of the terrorists who killed 14 and wounded nearly two dozen other people in a terror attack on a holiday party in a local government office.
As Breitbart News has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
Another group involved in the press conference is Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a radical left-wing organization that hosted convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh at a conference in 2017 before she was deported for lying to U.S. immigration officials about her violent past.
Other groups involved in the press conference include IfNotNow, a left-wing Jewish organization aimed at disrupting American Jewish institutional ties to Israel.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Photo: file