By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog
“I
say this as someone who’s known her since 1997: She’s trying,” Hala
Hijazi assured a panel at an anti-Israel DNC event that once she was
president, Kamala would crack down on Israel.
Hijazi, a Jordanian
immigrant who has roots in Gaza, is close to Kamala and they both came
up through the ranks together. The Muslim official and fundraiser had
worked as a special assistant to former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown
whom she described as a “mentor”.
Hala Hijazi was there for all
of Kamala’s races, raising money for her Senate campaign, promoting an
event co-hosted by Willie Brown, and promising that one day Kamala would
be in the White House. And she can be seen posing in 2004 at the
Bimbo’s club with Kamala, who had just begun her political career as San
Francisco’s DA, and Obama, running for Senate.
After obtaining
American citizenship in 1994, the Muslim immigrant quickly began
climbing the political ladder, working for Willie Brown, becoming a
‘human rights’ commissioner, and getting to know everyone in Democratic
politics. Hijazi’s social media feed is decorated with photos of her
posing with Bill Clinton, Hillary, Pelosi, the Obamas, and above all
else, Kamala.
“I’ve raised over $12 million for the Democratic Party,” Hijazi boasted at the anti-Israel panel.
Along
the way, Hijazi visited Saudi Arabia by invitation of the royal family,
advocated for the Iran Deal, which allowed the Islamic terrorist state
to develop its ballistic missile and nuclear program, and condemned
efforts to stop Muslim terrorists from coming to America.
And repeatedly denounced the Jewish State. A 2012 Free Beacon article by Adam Kredo profiled Hijazi as an “Obama bundler”, while noting her frequent attacks on Israel.
In
old letters to the editor in 2009 when Hamas first attempted to use
tunnels to invade Israel, Hijazi, who described herself as a “Muslim
Palestinian-American”, claimed that the blockade of Hamas lacked “any
moral justification and humanity” and denounced Israel for “destroying
places of worship and education.” She had claimed elsewhere that for the
Israeli government, “one death of an Israeli soldier equals a thousand
Palestinian children.”
After the Hamas massacres of Oct 7, Hijazi
relaunched her activism, claiming shortly afterward that 40 members of
her family had been killed by Israeli bombing campaigns against Hamas.
At the DNC, Hijazi claimed that over 100 members of her family had been
killed in the fighting. She provided no further details, but did hold up
a photo of a military age man.
A recent report by the Israeli N12 channel revealed
that a Hamas official had privately admitted that 80% of the Arab
Muslim settlers killed in the Gaza campaign were Hamas members or their
families. It’s unknown who Hijazi’s family members are or what their
relationship to Hamas may be, but they lived in which Gaza City was a
stronghold of Hamas and, if true, the high death toll among her family
members would raise the possibility of their links to Islamic terrorist
groups.
The Hijazis are a prominent family in Gaza City and their
members include Nizar Hijazi: the Hamas appointed mayor. Hijazi is a
relatively common name, but a number of Hamas figures, including former
commanders Hisham Hijazi, Muwaman Hijazi and Akram Hijazi, shared it.
It’s unknown if any of them are related to Hala Hijazi.
Al
Jazeera, the state media arm of Qatar, a sponsor of Hamas, claimed that
141 people from the Hijazi family had died in the fighting. Reports out
of Gaza claim that multiple airstrikes hit members of the Hijazi
family, not only in Gaza City, but in Rafah and elsewhere. These
repeated incidents are unlikely to be a coincidence which raises the
distinct possibility that someone close to a presidential candidate is
from a Hamas family.
Members of Hala’s family in America engaged
in anti-Israel activism including what appears to be her sister who
headed a chapter of the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Jerusalem.
Hamas terrorists with the last name Hijazi have been fighting Israel
going back decades and while it is a common last name, Arab societies
are defined by such large interrelated families.
No one in the media was however interested in following up.
Hala
Hijazi’s claims quickly made their way to her friend Kamala who took
the lead in pulling the Biden-Harris administration away from Israel. In
Dubai, Kamala broke with the initial pro-Israel position, complaining
that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed” and set limits on
what Israel could do against Hamas.
Her source for this was Hijazi.
On
November 2, Kamala Harris told members of the British press that, “I
have a friend, who I talked with recently, who has family in Gaza and
has lost a number of the members of her family — innocent civilians.”
Politico described this as “Harris has suggested that conversations with
friends have influenced her thinking about the war.” Either way it was
clear that Hijazi was influencing her friend even in the initial weeks
of Israel’s response to the Oct 7 attacks.
Hijazi, who had
bragged of becoming “a trusted source” for politicians, was succeeding
in moving her old friend of over two decades into the anti-Israel camp.
Halal
Hijazi has been reluctant to discuss Islamic terrorism or the actual
causes of the war. She claims to be an interfaith activist and a
“moderate”, but she can also be found moderating an event at the
Islamist Zaytuna College in 2019 with Hamza Yusuf and Salam Al-Marayati.
Yusuf,
a founder of Zaytuna, had described Judaism as a “most racist religion”
and at a cop-killer benefit two days before 9/11 warned that “this
country is facing a very terrible fate.”
“I am a citizen of this
country not by choice but by birth. I reside in this country not by
choice but by conviction in attempting to spread the message of Islam in
this country. I became Muslim in part because I did not believe the
false gods of this society, whether we call them Jesus or democracy or
the Bill of Rights,” Yusuf had admitted.
Salam Al-Marayati had defended Hamas and Hezbollah, and individual terrorists and
claimed that Israel was behind 9/11. Among the terrorist attacks he
defended was the Hezbollah bombing of the Marine Barracks which killed
over 200 American military members.
Marayati had analogized
Islamic terrorists to “American freedom fighters hundreds of years ago
[who] were also regarded as terrorists by the British.”
Other Zaytuna College faculty include Hatem Bazian, a founder of the anti-Israel campus movement, who targeted Jews during
his career, spewed antisemitic hate, described Jewish history as
imaginary, and fundraised for a Hamas-linked charity. Bazian had
co-founded Students for Justice in Palestine whose chapters have
celebrated the Oct 7 attacks.
At the anti-Israel DNC panel,
Hijazi claimed that, “I’m a long time Democrat, moderate Democrat”, but
there was nothing moderate about her ties to Zaytuna and Yusuf.
Hala
Hijazi joined a podcast with Hamza Yusuf to discuss “The Hundred Years
War on Palestine”. Yusuf described Hijazi as a “dear friend and her
father was a dear friend and they’re from Gaza”.
“She’s been just
advocating for decades now, at least a few decades, and has worked in
the Democratic Party in particular. But I think she really understands
the ins and outs of how this system works,” Yusuf said.
Hijazi
described herself as being part of a family that had “been in Gaza for
generations”, claimed that she had “been doing this work for 25 years”
and laid out her philosophy that America as “this country is built on
two numbers, number of votes and numbers of dollars raised.”
Hijazi’s career certainly appears to have been built on that cynical premise.
“It’s
a critical time in our country’s history to show our power,” Hijazi
urged and then laid out a plan to build up Muslim power over Americans.
The
Obama and Biden bundler advised Muslims to start at the bottom, focus
on school board races “because they end up running for mayor, assembly
and state senate.”
Muslim parents should consider getting “our
little children to start thinking about being a journalist or working
for the government” to create a pipeline for anti-Israel PR.
Hijazi
strategically told Muslims to start befriending non-Muslims, blacks and
Latinos to cultivate allies because “this is where we are at a
disadvantage where the other folks, that’s what they’re doing. This is
where we are at a disadvantage, where the other folks that’s what
they’re doing. They’re everywhere. And they look like they’re the
hospitable ones and the righteous ones.”
Who are the “other folks”? Presumably the Jews.
In
more strategic benevolence, Hijazi told Muslims to start doing
“philanthropy”. Research had shown, she claimed, that the Jewish and
Muslim communities “were the most giving and generous communities in
this country. And the problem with us is that we’re mostly giving it to
Muslims organizations and mosques. And to Muslim causes. But we also
need to start showing our power and our strength by giving money also
elsewhere so that we can cultivate those relationships. And again, all
this is political, like again, everything we’re doing is political.”
Charity was the most political of all.
“We
need to start doing more with the American Red Cross or the American
Cancer Society. You guys say, well that’s not politics, but it is. This
is where a lot of these major sponsors, fundraisers and donors to
buildings and to City Hall and to politicians are also the chairs of
these organizations.”
This may shed some light on why Hijazi is on the board of directors of the American Red Cross in Northern California.
Building political power, Hijazi explained, was about building relationships that could suppress criticism of the Hamas mobs.
“In
San Francisco, we have regular meetings with the District Attorney’s
office, we have regular meetings with the police chief, we have regular
meetings with the FBI, we have regular meetings with the Attorney
General. So when someone like me sees a crazy post by an elected
official, I can call them on their cell phone and say, ‘Hey, do you
understand that either you or your staff just tweeted something racist,
Islamophobic’, and calling our protesters pro-Hamas protesters is an
abomination to anything democratic.”
Denouncing the Hamas mobs in
the streets was an example of the kind of thing that Hijazi and her
allies could get politicians to suppress.
“Whether it started on October 7 or starting tomorrow, you guys need to start now,” she urged Muslims.
“They,” she said, meaning the Jews, “they have an ADL, and AIPAC and JCRC”.
Muslims needed to build up their power over American cultural and political life.
But
Hala Hijazi’s closeness to Kamala Harris raises questions not only for
Jews but for all Americans. The Muslim bundler had fumed over the Trump
administration’s efforts to keep Muslim terrorists out of America, and
furiously denounced a minority of patriotic Democrats who had voted for
the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act that required vetting
Syrians and Iraqis for terror ties before allowing them to penetrate the
United States of America.
What sort of influence would Hijazi’s
friend exercise over a Kamala Harris administration? And how many
Americans and Jews will die because of it just as they are dying now in
Israel?
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