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Team Obama includes a self-identified “Muslim Palestinian-American” campaign fundraiser who has a history of blasting Israel in highly charged letters and newspaper articles about the Middle East conflict.
Hala Hijazi, a Jordanian native and current San Francisco city employee, has personally secured between $100,000 to $200,000 for Obama’s reelection effort, according to Federal Election Committee filings.
She also has gone on record accusing Israel of war crimes while castigating America for providing the Jewish state critical military aid—a long-term investment that has bolstered U.S. security interests.
Hijazi, who has cultivated pristine left-wing credentials during her government career, is another name on an ever lengthening list of Obama-affiliated donors and bundlers who are either entangled in legal woes or hail from controversial backgrounds.
A prominent Hillary Clinton supporter who has long been entrenched in San Francisco’s left-wing political machine, Hijazi appears to be tapping a list of high profile West Coast liberals in an attempt to replenish the president’s campaign coffers.
Her public writings on Israel—an issue that has plagued Obama since the start of his presidency—reveal a longstanding and deep-seated hostility towards the Jewish state.
“As Americans we cannot allow the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to continue,” Hijazi wrote in a 2009 letter to the New York Times as rockets rained down on Israel from the Gaza Strip, provoking the Israelis to respond in self-defense. “The death of children and mothers and the Gaza blockade lack any moral justification and humanity.”
Hijazi went on to lament the U.S.-Israel military alliance and accuse Israel of destroying Muslim holy places.
“As God-fearing Americans, we cannot sit still and continue being silent when our taxpayer dollars are financing a war that is causing the death of innocent civilians and is destroying places of worship and education,” said Hijazi, who identified herself as “a Muslim Palestinian-American.”
American support for Israel is perverting the country’s collective morality, Hijazi claimed.
“We are citizens of a morally just country who believe in those rights; and once we Americans accept the loss of those rights for anyone, we risk losing them for ourselves,” wrote Hijazi, whocurrently serves as a project manager in the San Francisco City Attorney’s office. “We cannot allow the world to believe that we do not value life.”
Hijazi also alleged that Israel’s leaders wantonly kill Palestinian children in a 2001 San Francisco Chronicle article.
The election of Israeli military hero Ariel Sharon as prime minister “is a sad day in Palestine and all over the Mideast,” Hijazi told the paper.
“There is no peace,” she claimed, adding that Sharon’s “version of peace is security for Israel, and for him one death of an Israeli solider equals a thousand Palestinian children.”
As former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown’s “Palestinian campaign assistant” in 1999, Hijazi brought the mayor to an Arab cultural center to bolster his support in the minority community.
During the reception, attendees convinced Brown to express interest in having Beirut serve as San Francisco’s official “Sister City.” Hijazi also helped recruit Arab volunteers “from the audience to walk districts of the city in order to increase voter turnout,” according to a dispatch in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
One GOP operative blasted team Obama’s fundraising arm for what he described as its shameless associations with a cast of unsavory characters—among them Hijazi and a Persian-Jewish donor who stands accused of running a multi-million dollar Ponzi scheme.
“This has the potential to make the Obama Super-PAC completely toxic to voters—not just Jews and supporters of Israel, but your everyday swing voter that has no warm and fuzzy feelings about radical Islamists and terrorism,” said the senior GOP communications aide, who closely tracks campaign donations. “Every time you see an Obama Super-PAC ad, you’ll have to think of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Americans blown up in Jerusalem pizza parlors.”
The aide recommended that Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod “disavow this woman as soon as possible.”
Hijazi is closely tied to San Francisco’s vast network of entrenched Democratic political figures.
“She’s clearly part of the machine,” said Stephen Schwartz, an author and former San Francisco Chronicle reporter. “It’s the radical left and she’s at the heart of it.”
Hijazi has positioned herself as “a representative of Arab interests in the San Francisco political machine,” and her views are “representative in the Bay Area of politically correct attitudes about the Middle East,” Schwartz added.
Hijazi’s status as an Obama bundler, Schwartz said, “is definitely a reflection of the support that the San Francisco machine gives to the national leadership group in the Democratic Party.”
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