Islamic pro-terror groups reacted to the Hamas terror attacks of Oct 7 not only with riots and public pressure campaigns aimed at politicians, but also by privately meeting with top federal and state law enforcement officials to demand that they lock up Jewish political opponents.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center’s investigative arm exclusively reported last month that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamist group whose leader had celebrated Oct 7, had been meeting with attorney generals around the country trying to convince them to arrest journalists and activists who had been investigating and exposing Hamas supporters.
Based on our past history with CAIR, the Freedom Center could be one of their targets.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) has been caught meeting with Attorney General Merrick Garland and senior Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, including FBI Director Christopher Wray and Associate Attorney General Lisa Monaco, to also discuss targeting Jews.
The meeting, originally reported by Militant Islamic Monitor, represents another part of what appears to be a larger effort by Islamist groups to weaponize prosecutors against their critics.
On May 22nd, top Department of Justice officials and the FBI Director met with Arab American Institute boss James Zogby and MPAC founder Salam al-Marayati. Both men have been accused of supporting terrorism, including Hamas, in accusations going back decades.
Zogby, a Lebanese Arab activist, had described Hezbollah, which was responsible for the murder of hundreds of Americans, as “the Lebanese armed resistance”.
“By criminalizing attempts to send money to Hezbollah or to support it, the FBI is confusing and alienating people here who could be allies in the war on terrorism,” he had warned the FBI.
Hezbollah’s crimes included the torture and murder of Colonel William R. Higgins, whose castrated body was found near a mosque with the”skin on his face partially removed.”
When Hezbollah terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847, they tortured Robert Stethem, a Navy diver, by “jumping in the air and landing full force on his body. He must have had all his ribs broken.”
“They put the mic up to his face so his screams could be heard by the outside world,” a stewardess described.
But rather than expelling or arresting terrorist supporters, the FBI was meeting with them.
Salam al-Marayati had defended Hamas, blamed Israel for 9/11 and claimed that Hezbollah was not engaged in terrorism, but “ legitimate resistance… that could be called liberation movement.” When Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killing 241 military personnel, he argued that “tt was a military operation, producing no civilian casualties.”
(Al-Marayati was not telling the truth. The attack also killed Lebanese employees in the area.)
“Yesterday’s terrorists in the Middle East are today’s leaders,” he had argued and “Hamas in terms of its social and educational operations is doing exactly what the PLO was doing 35 years ago, as well as its quote unquote military operations.”
MPAC, the organization Al-Marayati had co-founded, had issued policy papers calling for the removal of Hamas and Hezbollah from its list of terror groups. At a meeting of the Palestine Committee’ of Hamas supporters in America, MPAC had been described as a “sympathetic” group that could be used as “an entry point to use them to pressure Congress and the decision-makers in America.” Was that what MPAC was doing here?
Normally, the FBI should have been interrogating MPAC, but instead MPAC was interrogating it.
Salam al-Marayati filmed a video outside the Attorney General’s office in which he falsely claimed that the Hamas campus encampments had been “peaceful” and that the violence had come from the police, and urged an investigation to “hold law enforcement accountable”.
But at the meeting arranged by Zogby, Al-Marayati, based on MPAC’s account of events, went even further off the rails and claimed that Muslims were under attack by Jewish “terrorists” allied with the “Proud Boys” and demanded that the FBI do something about them.
This bizarre screed should have ended the meeting, but instead the DOJ and the FBI took it seriously. And that is every bit as troubling as meeting with terrorist apologists in the first place.
Al-Marayati’s only example of Jews fighting back against Hamas supporters occurred at UCLA when, after a female Jewish student had been knocked unconscious and multiple Jewish community members had been assaulted, with no response from the university, campus police or the LAPD, some young Jewish men showed up and took on the terrorist encampment.
However, according to the MPAC account, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he would pass on the case to the FBI's Los Angeles field office. This is troubling because a previous exclusive Freedom Center investigation found that the FBI LA office had treated assaults against Muslims and by Muslims against Jews very differently. Any FBI investigation by UCLA prompted by Islamists to focus not only on Muslim antisemitic violence, but only on the response to that violence by a small handful of young Jewish men, would be a civil rights violation.
Attorney General Garland and the DOJ leadership should be fighting Islamic terrorism. Instead they’re meeting with groups like MPAC that have a history of defending Islamic terrorism. And not only are they meeting with them, they’re taking cues about investigations from them.
The DOJ and the FBI have gone from fighting Islamic terrorists to taking orders from them.
CAIR’s efforts to influence state attorney generals and MPAC’s attempt to manipulate the United States Attorney General and the FBI to target political and religious opponents, especially Jews, are in line with Islamist supremacist groups who, in their own home countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, routinely lock up opponents and repress non-Muslims. But that should have no place in America. The Biden administration has opened the doors of the federal government to the worst possible extremists in the hopes of winning another term in office.
Had Al-Marayati not filmed his video, we might never have known what the Biden administration was doing. Instead, a private meeting has gone public and the investigative arm of the David Horowitz Freedom Center will continue monitoring the secret alliance between Islamists and government officials, exposing their events and holding them accountable.
Even as the Biden administration promises that it is fighting antisemitism, it’s holding covert meetings with antisemites who demand that the FBI go after the Jews.
