Just as Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) was getting comfortable as the front-runner for chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), along came Labor Secretary Tom Perez (shown) on Thursday to challenge him for the position. Perez, who will be out of a job come January 20, directed his opening salvo at Ellison: “Now, more than ever, I believe we need a full-time chair who can inspire people, grow our party, and speak to the broad tent.”
Ellison, if elected chair of the DNC (the vote will take place in late February), would be a part-time chair unless he resigns from Congress. And Ellison also has a little problem with the “broad tent”: his anti-Semitic past is coming back to bite him. And that is causing some big Democrat donors more than a little heartburn.
As The New American noted last month, Ellison has a nearly perfect profile to represent the hard-left Democrat Party. He has in hand endorsements from far-left and/or high-profile Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Elizabeth Warren. And on Thursday he received an endorsement from the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) representing some 670,000 government workers.
Ellison’s nearly perfect profile includes being the first Muslim elected to the House of Representatives; using the Quran instead of the Holy Bible while being sworn in; co-founding the House Progressive Caucus; being a former member of the steering committee of the communist National Lawyers Guild; receiving an endorsement from the Communist Party USA; failing to pay his income taxes for five straight years; endorsing the far-left radical Louis Farrakhan; and a nearly complete disregard for his oath of office, compiling a voting record on Constitutional issues of just 25 out of 100 on the John Birch Society’s Freedom Index.
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It could be his long relationship with anti-Semite Farrakhan that caused the White House to persuade Perez to offer an alternative to Ellison. Just a few days after The New American article appeared in November, investigative journalist Joel Mowbray, writing in the Daily Caller, expanded on Ellison’s anti-Semitism: “The man poised to head the Democratic Party was a spokesman for the Nation of Islam well into his 30s who publicly spewed anti-Semitism and later in life as a Congressional candidate knowingly accepted $50,000 in campaign contributions given and raised by Islamic radicals who openly supported Islamic terrorism and were leaders of front groups for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Mowbray added: “Ellison has never genuinely repudiated his past anti-Semitism or his close association with the terror-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) or its co-founder, Nihad Awad, who has publicly supported Islamic terrorism.”
This no doubt caught the attention of one of the Democrat Party’s major Jewish donors, Haim Saban. During a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum last Saturday, Saban (who gave millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign) expressed his grave concerns over Ellison as DNC chair: “If you go back to his positions, his papers, his speeches, the way he has voted, he is clearly an anti-Semite and anti-Israel individual. Words matter and actions matter more. Keith Ellison would be a disaster for the relationship between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party.”
Political parties run on donations, and Saban’s threat to close his checkbook if Ellison were elected chair of the DNC was likely more than enough for the White House to put forth Perez as a more moderate alternative. Of course, Perez is not a sure thing either, as a lot can change between now and the vote for that position, which won’t take place for another two months — a lifetime in politics.
Photo: AP Images
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
