Guess who's coming to dinner? The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) Philadelphia Chapter's first annual fundraising banquet, that is.
Let's back up.
Joe Sestak is the freshman Representative from Pennsylvania's 7th Congressional District. My district. Up until January 4th and for the 20 years before that, our Representative was Curt Weldon, one of the more serious point men in the battle to defend this country and the rest of the world against Islamist terrorism. Weldon, you may recall, was the victim of a conveniently timed ethics investigation that ramped up to fever pitch in the weeks immediately preceding the midterms and then quickly disappeared.
Sestak, on the other hand, centered his campaign around his promise to pull our troops out of Iraq ASAP, by hook or by crook. He was resigned from a 30-year career in the US Navy in 2005 for reasons that are explored and debated in depth elsewhere.
So on January 4, 2007, Sestak took office, and he's been busy trying to make good on his promise. And then a funny thing happened. Joe was invited to be the keynote speaker at Philly CAIR's fundraiser on April 7th. And he accepted. Well, sort of.
I'll give him this. Sestak actually had the nerve to appear before a town meeting at The Suburban Jewish Community Center/B'nai Aaron synagogue this afternoon in Havertown, Pennsylvania. I was there, along with a number of other indignant constituents and congregants who wanted to know what the hell he was thinking, as well as a number of other constituents and congregants who had other things on their minds. CAIR dominated the Q&A, though, by a substantial margin. The answers we got were unsatisfactory. In fact, when the meeting was over, Sestak had dug himself into a much deeper hole than he started out in. And it was already pretty deep.
"A person on my staff accepted the invitation," he began, by way of response to the pointed question put to him by Rabbi Lisa Malik, the spiritual leader of SJCC-BA, because 250 of his constituents were going to be there. Maybe. Later, he said that he didn't know how many of his constituents were actually going to be there, but that he had been told 250. And the staff person who accepted the invitation on his behalf, without consulting him? Her name is Adeeba Al Zaman and, ooops, as it turns out, until September, 2006, she was Director of Communications for ... CAIR-PA. Are we cosy enough yet?
Sestak says that once he discovered that fundraising was involved, he refused to participate in that part of the event, or to appear with other speakers. Not surprising, when you look at the other speakers scheduled, but I'll get to that in a minute. Sestak's solution, rather than canceling his appearance, was to demand that CAIR bifurcate the event into two parts. If you go to their website, for now, you'll see a strange introductory page. Two identical posters for the same event in the same venue, one advertising Sestak's keynote address and dinner at 5:30 at $50 a person ($55 after April 1) and the second advertising the "fundraiser" and the three subsequent speakers at 7:45. There is, of course, but one registration for "both."
Sestak is "taken with the Muslim community," he says. They were very supportive of him during his campaign. All well and good but, as one participant asked, if CAIR represents a terrorist supporting extremist fringe of the Muslim community, what kind of message does his appearance at their banquet send to all of those moderate Muslims who don't agree with CAIR's agenda? Well, says Sestak, he's not going to this banquet in support of CAIR. Far from it, he intends to send them a clear message that the failure to condemn terrorism, by name, specifically, is wrong. So why does he need to do this as the headliner at their fundraising banquet? Steve Feldman, executive director of the Philadelphia ZOA asked whether Sestak would attend a KKK convention to send them such a message. "No," replied Sestak. "But I would talk to them."
Huh?
Sestak believes in talking to people. "Just because I talk to somebody doesn't mean I'm the other person's enemy," he said, in the rather strange syntax he employed throughout much of this exchange. He believes he'll send a better, stronger message to CAIR by attending this event than he would by staying away. And he believes it's "the right thing to do." In response to a request that he publish a position paper on CAIR, he first said he "could do that," but then said it wasn't a promise. He's way too busy with the Iraq thing right now, and he'd have to make sure a position paper got it exactly right. He did agree, however, to post the text of his get-tough speech to CAIR on his website. Keep an eye out for that. It should be interesting.
Sestak refuses to take a cue from Barbara Boxer. Or from Charles Schumer and Dick Durban. He makes much of the fact that CAIR has not been "shut down by the government," as has the Holy Land Foundation, for example. CAIR hasn't been accused of breaking any laws, he says. But he ignores the fact that CAIR's initial funding came from the very same Holy Land Foundation and that five of its former officers and directors are currently under indictment for terror-related activities. Two of them, Ismail Royer and Ghassan Elashi, are serving time. In fact, in the same breath as Sestak openly acknowledges that "failing to condemn terrorism is supporting it," he insists that if CAIR were supporting terror, they wouldn't be permitted to operate (sorry, but you can't have it both ways).
As for Ms. Al-Zaman, who he claims got him into this predicament in the first place, he is standing by her because, he says, "I have a fault. I love my staff." He didn't even know Adeeba was a Muslim when he hired her, let alone that she had worked for CAIR, and it was only after the protests began to arrive at his office that he noticed the CAIR reference on her resume. Excuse me? One has to wonder if this Congressman applies the same level of care and scrutiny to his national policy decisions as he does to his hiring choices. In fact, on numerous occasions during the meeting, on subjects ranging from health care to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal, he admitted having failed to do his homework.
I gathered that many of the people in that room today voted for Rep. Sestak. I wasn't one of them. But by the end of the afternoon it appeared that a number of them were having second thoughts about that vote. Hey. 2008 is just around the corner.
As for the other speakers presenting at Philly CAIR's banquet next month, we have Raphael Narbaez, who has called Zionism a "repressive political ideology" that has nothing to do with Judaism, accused Zionists of having "the same racist ideology that the Nazis of Germany had" and predicted the end of Israel. Then we have Parvez Ahmed, CAIR's Chairman of the Board, who claims on his blog that "[America's] one-sided support for Israel is a liability in the war on terror." And, first and foremost, we have Edward Peck, a great admirer of the Walt and Mearsheimer "Jewish Lobby" libel, who had a warm fuzzy sit-down with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last summer as the rockets fell in northern Israel and, earlier last year, another with Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal in Damascus. Nice company, Joe.
For more analysis of this deeply disturbing example of Congressman Sestak's abominable lack of judgment and what you can try to do about it, see Beila Rabinowitz, here, and her website Militant Islam Monitor.
