Vice President Kamala Harris has close ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a radical organization whose executive director celebrated the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel.
As Breitbart News has reported, CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, said he was “happy” at news of the terror attack. Throughout the war that erupted thereafter, CAIR has spread inflammatory anti-Israel propaganda.
As Breitbart News has noted in the past:
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).
A report by Robert Spencer at FrontPageMag.com notes:
This has been known for years, but no one has cared. Back in Oct. 2020, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “as California’s attorney general and then as U.S. senator, Harris forged a relationship with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the nation’s top anti-Israel groups and advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state.” After the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, this matters more than ever.
CAIR, the Free Beacon added, “advised Harris on community issues during her time in California politics, and she later offered the group her ‘gratitude and admiration’ in a 2018 personal letter to the group.” Specifically, “Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, praised Harris in 2015 for including the group in an interfaith meeting with law enforcement officials. Harris, he said, ‘exemplified leadership’ by vowing to tackle Islamophobia at a time when the state’s Jewish institutions were facing threats.”
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Even that was not all. “As California’s top cop,” the Free Beacon noted, “Harris partnered with local CAIR officials and relied on them to advise her about community matters. In 2015, for instance, Harris hosted CAIR for an interfaith community event following a deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In 2016, as Harris ran for the Senate, CAIR’s political action committee donated $1,750 to boost her campaign.” That may not be much in the larger scheme of things, but imagine the outcry if Donald Trump had taken a small fraction of that amount from a group linked to the Ku Klux Klan.
Separately, FrontPageMag’s Daniel Greenfield reports that Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband, worked for a law firm that represented radical anti-Israel interests and pro-Palestinian groups, including Al Jazeera.
Greenfield notes:
The newspaper noted that Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, was a partner at DLA Piper whose “lobbying clients” had included the governments of Afghanistan and Bahrain, as well as the Qatari government-funded Al Jazeera Network and the Palestine Monetary Authority.
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Democrats have long used Douglas Emhoff, Kamala’s husband, who was raised in a Jewish family, as a defense against critics noting her troubling political views, but Emhoff’s law firm connections raise their own issues, both apart from his wife and perhaps reflective of her.
Kamala’s husband did not personally represent terrorists, terrorist sponsors or terrorist-linked entities during his time at DLA Piper (one of his clients at a previous law firm was however an arms dealer who was since charged and plead guilty) but he benefited from a firm that did.
CAIR participated in shaping the Biden administration’s so-called “antisemitism strategy,” which was led by Emhoff. CAIR’s contribution was to remove extreme criticism of Israel from the government’s definition of antisemitism.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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