All the President’s Islamists

In 2014, Abdullah Hasan was a recipient of the CAIR-SFBA Islamic Scholarship Fund. He went on to defend BDS for the ACLU. Now he’s an assistant press secretary at the White House.

CAIR is an Islamist organization that was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in one of the largest terror financing trials in America. Its founders were linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and it has opposed efforts to protect the United States against Islamic terrorism.

“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad had declared.

When Hasan received his scholarship in 2014-2015, the Islamic Scholarship Fund’s board members included Hatem Bazian, one of the country’s most notorious Islamic bigots, the co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine, and an alleged supporter of Hamas, who has spent decades trafficking in antisemitism.

Hasan’s fellow CAIR-SFBA recipients included Salmah Rizvi, a former fellow at Al-Haq, a BDS group listed by Israel as a terrorist organization over its connections to the PFLP. Al-Haq’s general director is allegedly a key terrorist leader in the PFLP. Despite this background, Rizvi got an intelligence position in the Obama administration and produced materials that went into the President’s Daily Brief. After leaving the administration, she bailed out her best friend,

Urooj Rahman, who had been accused of throwing molotov cocktails at a police car.

After conducting research around “primary Islamic texts and within a post-9/11 surveillance culture”, Hasan went into activism, opposing anti-BDS measures on behalf of the ACLU.

In an op-ed co-written by Hasan, he defended “lawful boycotts of Israel” and claimed that opposition to BDS was a “loyalty test”.

In 2019, Hasan ranted that, “Islamophobia is rampant even in our highest democratic institutions” like the Supreme Court.

Now he represents the Biden administration as one of its press secretaries.

Abdullah Hasan is one of a record number of over 100 Muslim staffers in the Biden administration. The growth has been especially astonishing considering that MOSAIC, an association of Muslim federal employees, could only gather 110 personnel for its second Iftar in 2016 and there are now almost as many aligned Muslims within the administration.

Kamala Harris commemorated Ramadan by posing with most of them on the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and described them as “our administration’s incredible Muslim team.”

Biden’s incredible Muslim team includes men and women whom we have already profiled like Maher Bitar, a former executive board member of Hatem Bazian’s Students for Justice in Palestine and anti-Israel BDS activist who became Biden’s Senior Director for Intelligence on the National Security Council, Reema Dodin, Biden’s first “Palestinian” staffer who had defended suicide bombings, and Mazen Basrawi, Biden’s new Muslim liaison, who attended a conference honoring one of the unindicted co-conspirators of the World Trade Center bombing,

But there are many others who have not been fully investigated or profiled.

They include Aya Ibrahim, who started out as a legislative fellow to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, one of the most vocal terrorist supporters in Congress, and then a legislative assistant and adviser to fellow Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley. Biden took her on and brought her into the National Economic Council and then elevated her to a senior adviser in the White House Office of Technology and Policy only six years after she had graduated with a BA in Political Science.

Sameera Fazili briefly served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council in the Biden Administration. At Harvard, she had served as president of the Harvard Islamic Society the year that it had conducted a fundraising dinner for the Holy Land Foundation: a Hamas front group.

(The event, part of the Harvard Islamic Society’s Islamic Awareness Week was co-chaired by Faiz Shakir who went on to become a top adviser to Senator Harry Reid, worked for Nancy Pelosi and became Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager.)

At Harvard, Fazili had assailed counterterrorism expert Steve Emerson.

Fazili had a past with Karamah: Muslim Women for Human Rights which claims that “Islamic jurisprudence is the source of the knowledge base essential to the promotion of the rights of Muslim women”. The organization has defended Sharia law.

According to the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch, Fazili was a leading member of Stand With Kashmir: “best known for praising and defending violent Islamists in South Asia.” Her organization had called for the release of Islamic terrorists including supporters of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Uzra Zeya started out as a staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs: an informal arm of the Arab Lobby started by former diplomats to Muslim countries. While there Zeya helped compile material for a book claiming that Jews secretly control the United States. Biden chose Zeya as his undersecretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights.

After the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown, Zeya complained that “there are activists — including some in Egypt — who face criminal charges and intimidation for the peaceful exercise of their rights.”

Salman Ahmed, a former UN Peacekeeping official, was picked by Biden to oversee his transition team’s national security and foreign policy review before taking over at the Director of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff. When Biden allowed the Taliban to take Kabul, Ahmed was sent to negotiate with the Taliban in Qatar.

Rashad Hussain, Biden’s “ambassador for religious freedom”, who has a degree in Islamic Studies and had memorized the Koran, had been Obama’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. During his time working for Obama, he had been caught lying about his past defense of an Islamic terrorist. Hussain had appeared at events with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. His wife, Isra Bhatty, became famous volunteering as a translator for Islamic terrorists in Gitmo before moving on to a senior position at the Justice Department.

Even after Hussain’s appointment, he appeared at an Islamic Society of North America convention whose speakers had “promoted anti-Hindu rhetoric, called for the release of convicted terror supporters and for the establishment of a caliphate.” “One activist who spoke at the convention called convicted Hamas terror supporters, ‘the finest men.'”

Brenda Abdelall, the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, had participated in anti-Israel BDS protests in college. In a newspaper op-ed in 2002, she had falsely accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” as part of a “brutal occupation”.

“We cannot let the entire population of Palestinians suffer any longer, nor can we let the entire population of Chechens suffer either,” the Muslim activist had insisted.

Abdelall went on to work for the ACLU and then Muslim Advocates: a group working to stop America from fighting against Islamic terrorism. She taught a course at the University of Michigan Law School on ‘Islamophobia and the Law’. joined “Arab Americans for Biden” and was rewarded with a position at the Department of Homeland Security as “assistant secretary for partnership and engagement”.

Even after this appointment, Abdelall appeared at the same convention as Hussain where speakers had called for a caliphate ruled by Islamic law and freeing Islamic terrorists..

This is a snapshot of not all, but some of the President’s Islamists. As the number of Islamic staffers in the administration continues to grow, it becomes difficult to keep track of more than a few of them. What was once ‘entryism’ has become a hijacking. And yet what we do see is troubling. Despite the denials, looking into the backgrounds of some of Biden’s more than 100 Islamic staffers, it doesn’t take much to turn up support for terrorists, hostility to America and Israel, and associations with the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups.

The Biden administration is not, as some call it, “soft on terror”; it’s a Trojan horse of terror.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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