Mitch Daniels "Honored" by Notorious Jew-Hating, Supremacist Organization AAI

Mitch Daniels has become the new it boy of the GOP and the race for the Republican presidential nominee in 2012. I, OTOH, am not impressed by this johnny come lately, but have kept my reservations quiet until now.

Once you are "honored" and "awarded" by Islamic supremacists, that should be the kibosh on any candidate. Tim Pawlenty , as Governor of Minnesota, had his Housing Finance Agency set up a Shariah-compliant lending fund. His fumble of Franken's wholesale theft of the election Senate race was bad enough; sharia finance is the death knell for a limpwristed RINO.

Back to Mitch Daniels. The American Arab Institute, co-founded by James Zogby, is presenting their annual award to Mitch Daniels.

Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. was elected as the 49th Governor of the State of Indiana in 2004. Under the governor’s leadership, Indiana has seen improvements to the state’s infrastructure resulting from the $4 billion lease of the Indiana Toll Road. In 2005, he created the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, tasked with attracting new jobs to the state. The state is now near the top of every national ranking for business attractiveness. Governor Daniels has also spearheaded reforms to enhance the performance of government, including efforts to improve the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the departments of Child Services and Corrections.

Governor Daniels is the grandchild of Syrian immigrants. He has been involved with AAI for the past 25 years, and has spoken at a number of events including the 2002 Gibran Awards Gala and our 2001 inauguration party.

Notorious Jew hater James Zogby is the co-founder and President of the Arab Institute. Mitch Daniels has been invovled with this nototrious anti-Israel Israel organziation for 25 years. How repulsive. Zogby is one of the ugliest of supremacist activists. Daniels should get nowhere near the nomination. Zogby is:

Founder and director of numerous Muslim rights groups President of the Arab American Institute Has referred to Israelis as “Nazis,” and calls Israel’s actions against the PLO “a Holocaust”

Democratic political consultant James Zogby is a leading figure in some of the most influential Arab American civil rights organizations in the United States. He is also a senior analyst with Zogby International, a market research and polling group.

Zogby was born in 1945 in Utica, New York to Lebanese Catholic parents. He earned his Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Temple University in 1975. In 1976 he attended Princeton University, where he was a National Endowment for the Humanities post-doctoral fellow.

In 1977 Zogby co-founded the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, which served as the propaganda arm of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization.

Two years later, Zogby campaigned to prevent the extradition of Ziad Abu Eain, a Fatah member accused of taking part in a 1979 bombing which resulted in the deaths of two Israeli civilians and the wounding of thirty-six others.

In 1980 Zogby co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), created as a counterweight to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization.

In 1985 Zogby established the Washington, DC-based Arab American Institute (AAI), an organization that conducts voter-education and voter-registration initiatives aimed at increasing the political influence of Arab Americans. Zogby's brother John, who runs the aforementioned polling firm Zogby International, is an AAI board member.

James Zogby has played a major role in Democratic Party affairs since the early 1980s. In 1984 he served as an advisor to Jesse Jackson's failed presidential campaign. In 1988, while serving as a member of the Democratic Party's National Platform Committee, Zogby introduced a plank in support of Palestinian statehood -- an issue he would later address in front of the Democratic National Convention. In the 1990s Zogby gained political favor with the Clinton administration, which allowed him to promote the establishment of U.S. investments in Palestinian businesses in Gaza and the West Bank.

Zogby and Clinton did not always see eye-to-eye, however, and in January 1995 Zogby criticized the President's executive order designating a number of Islamic extremist organizations as terrorist groups. According to Zogby, such designations would have negative repercussions for Arab Americans.

When the U.S. government arrested the Hamas political leader Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook in July 1995, Zogby warned that Marzook's capture would ultimately prove to be “destructive and not helpful to the peace process.”

While Israelis and Palestinians were at work on the Oslo II accords in 1995, Zogby penned the article “This Peace Is Not Yet Peace,” wherein he blamed Israeli intransigence for derailing any possibility of progress. Rationalizing Palestinian terrorism as nothing more sinister than “desperate acts of striking out against the master,” Zogby said:

“All that Israelis will talk about is ‘the terror.’ … [But] Palestinians remain powerless. Their land continues to be taken from them, the humiliation and control and terror of the occupation remain facts of life. And this powerlessness has produced deformities in the culture: anger, despair and cynicism. Israelis remain in control.... [T]he Israelis perpetuate acts of collective punishment (its own form of terror) designed to demonstrate their power and to remind the Palestinians of their powerlessness. It is lost on the Israelis that this simply produces more despair and anger, and creates more Palestinian victims who will support desperate acts of striking out against the master -- and so the cycle of violence is perpetuated.”

Throughout the 1990s, Zogby operated in conjunction with such U.S. agencies as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, all in an effort to promote Palestinian economic development. Meanwhile he urged Arab nations to refrain from stabilizing their relations with Israel, stating that it was time "for the Arab League to reinvigorate its stand on the boycott [against Israel]."

In 1999 Zogby was elected to be the co-convener of the National Democratic Ethnic Coordinating Committee, an umbrella organization comprised of U.S. Democratic Party leaders.

In October 2000, Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder and Executive Director of the American Muslim Council and an Islamic affairs advisor for the Clinton administration, spoke at a rally where he emphatically declared his support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. In response, a number of political candidates who had received campaign contributions from Alamoudi quickly sought to distance themselves from any controversy by returning those funds. Zogby decried their actions as capitulation to "a shameful hysteria campaign of McCarthyism."

Characterizing Hamas-perpetrated terrorism against Israelis as an understandable part of "a cycle" of violence, Zogby has stressed the importance of trying "to understand why the [Hamas] perpetrators acted as they did or why there are people whose anger and despair bring them to support this or that crime."

Zogby also has respectfully described the Hezbollah terrorists of southern Lebanon as "the Lebanese armed resistance."

By contrast, he has referred to Israelis as "Nazis," and has portrayed Israel's actions against a PLO insurgency during the 1982 War in Lebanon as "a Holocaust."

Zogby scoffs at the notion that fundraising efforts by Muslims living in America may be in any way connected to overseas terrorist groups:

"Wire transfers of funds from other countries are one thing, but to allege that Arab-Americans and American Muslim groups are involved in fundraising terrorism is something else entirely ... There is virtually no measurable support for ‘terrorism’ among Arab Americans and American Muslims."

Zogby also condemns what he perceives to be widespread civil liberties violations directed against Arab Americans in the post-9/11 period. “The USA Patriot Act and initiatives launched by the Attorney General in the aftermath of September 11,” says Zogby, “have endangered basic constitutionally protected rights of due process and judicial review.” (there's much more here)

Seeks to promote Arab American participation in the U.S. electoral system, both as voters and as candidates Opposed ending Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime Opposes Israel's security wall

A self-described "nonpartisan" group, the Arab American Institute (AAI) was established in 1985 to promote "Arab American participation in the U.S. electoral system" and to advocate for the "domestic and policy concerns" of that demographic. Toward that end, AAI developed a strong reputation for organizing "voter-education" campaigns and acting as a liaison between the Arab American community and the major national political parties.

Operating on an annual budget of about $1 million, AAI's major activities include the following: convening national and local organizations for "national leadership summits to respond to crisis situations"; holding meetings with policy-makers and U.S. government officials; helping establish Arab American Democratic and Republican leadership councils; hosting events at national and state party conventions; conducting get-out-the-vote drives and candidate forums; "registering and informing" Arab American voters in "key" states; producing a variety of issue briefs on topics of concern to Arab Americans; publishing an annual "congressional scorecard" detailing how elected officials have voted on various matters; periodically organizing member-mobilizations; conducting polling and research of Arab American voters; and organizing trips to the Middle East for members of Congress and other U.S. delegations.

AAI also conducts media outreach and provides public information via several regularly distributed publications, including: (a) its weekly e-newsletter AAI Bulletin; (b) Countdown, a weekly update that covers political developments in Congress and the White House; and (c) AAInsider, a seasonal magazine for Institute members.

Moreover, AAI co-founder, President, and leading spokesman James Zogby is the author of Washington Watch, a weekly column for the Arab World and the Arab American press. Zogby also hosts Viewpoint, a weekly policy program that airs on Abu Dhabi TV and Link TV. Formerly the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Zogby is a major figure in Democratic Party affairs. He advised Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign and was close to President Clinton.

James Zogby's brother John, who runs a polling business, is an AAI Board member, along with international marketing executive and AAI backup spokesperson Jean Abi Nader. The Institute's Executive Director is Nidal Ibrahim, formerly the founder and publisher of Arab American Business Magazine. AAI's Chairman is the Republican George Salem, a partner in the Washington, DC law office of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, a firm that has been prominent in defending Saudis accused of involvement in terrorism.

Subdivided into numerous community branches, AAI is extremely active on university campuses nationwide. Prior to September 11, 2001, the organization enjoyed immense popularity in the U.S. media, especially among liberal and peace-oriented American Jews, for its seemingly moderate position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Following 9/11, however, the tone of AAI's public pronouncements underwent a striking change; with ever-increasing frequency, the Institute denounced its opponents as racists, extremists, and Zionist agents. Moreover, it vehemently denied charges that Saddam Hussein had ever supported terrorism. According to Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz, in the wake of September 11th AAI "moved from the center to the extreme left of the American public square."

Among the issues AAI is currently focused on are: opposition to America's war against Iraq; opposition to Israel's construction of a barrier in the West Bank to prevent would-be terrorists from entering areas populated by Israeli civilians; and the denunciation of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's land-for-peace proposals at Camp David in 2000. Characterizing Israel as a brutal oppressor of the Palestinian people, AAI was a signatory to a May 20, 2004 Joint Muslims/Arab-American Statement on Israeli Violence in Gaza, which "strongly condemn[ed]" Israel's "indiscriminate killings of innocent Palestinians, including many children," and its "demolition of Palestinian homes."

AAI also denounces what it depicts as widespread civil liberties violations directed against Arab Americans in the post-9/11 period. "The USA Patriot Act and initiatives launched by the Attorney General in the aftermath of September 11," says James Zogby, "have endangered basic constitutionally protected rights of due process and judicial review."

"Since 9/11," Jean Abi Nader concurs, "Arab-Americans have watched their dream of being fully a part of American society subject to the stresses of federal initiatives … that produce fear and intimidation in their community. … Being an Arab has become a liability in this country. We are being told, essentially, that we are not good enough. … The civil liberties of Arab-Americans and American Muslims came under attack, and we have been treated increasingly as second-class citizens in this country." Abi Nader further laments the "systematic degrading of Islam by conservative Christians, neoconservatives and the right wing," who he portrays as chief among those who view Islam as a "religion of liars and terrorists."

During a panel discussion at an October 2003 conference of the Arab American Institute, Marwan Kreidie of the AAI National Leadership Conference referred to "that lunatic [John] Ashcroft," the then-Attorney General who was the chief enforcer of the Patriot Act. "Anytime Ashcroft comes to Philadelphia, we hand him a copy of the Constitution," said Kreidie. AAI was a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress "to oppose … 'Patriot [Act] II'" on grounds that it "contain[ed] a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers … that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights." In addition, AAI has given its organizational endorsement to the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, which tries to influence city councils to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act. AAI also endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act of 2004, which was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

AAI has received funding from the Open Society Institute and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the ChevronTexaco Foundation, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Ford Motor Company Fund, and the Seaver Institute.

All Mitch has to do is check out the reasons behind his grandparents' immigration from Syria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the early part of the last century.

First off, they were Christians. Secondly, they and other Christians in various parts of the Ottoman Empire faced some serious persecution at the time ~ the Armenians, for example, lost well over a million people. The Christians in Homs and Aleppo excaped the worst of it, but a huge number of them ended up in the Great Lakes states working steel mills and the like ~ eventually along side the son of the former Shah of Iran (a refugee from an earlier Iranian revolution).

Interesting that the son of folks who escaped a coming genocide that actually did nearly exterminate another Christian group should be attacked for futzing around with Arabs. Hmm?!?!??!

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