At daybreak on October 7, 2023, the Gaza-based Islamic terror group Hamas — an organization candidly and explicitly dedicated, since the day of its inception, to the mass murder of Jews and the permanent annihilation of Israel — carried out a massive, multi-front, surprise attack against the Jewish state. The terrorists fired at least 5,000 rockets into southern and central Israel while a host of armed Hamas fighters simultaneously infiltrated the Israeli border in dozens of separate locations by land, sea, and air (with paragliders). The attack had been planned in conjunction with officers from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with agents of the Iran-sponsored terrorist groups Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All told, the official Israeli casualty toll was more than 1,200 dead (including at least 32 Americans) and 4,500 injured. The Hamas barbarians, in the course of their atrocities, paraded some of their victims’ mutilated corpses through the streets of Gaza, to the raucous cheers of bloodthirsty Palestinian crowds. Moreover, they took more than 250 Israelis hostage, including dozens who were American citizens, and moved them to the Gaza Strip, where some would be murdered in cold blood while others would be raped or otherwise violated while being held as bargaining chips for future negotiations with Israel. These Hamas attacks prompted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare, also on October 7, that Israel was officially “at war” with Hamas.
Many American leftists reacted to October 7th precisely as they had responded to prior Hamas atrocities – by initially uttering a few obligatory, pro forma repudiations of the transgressions, and then immediately alleging that a long train of Israeli abuses was ultimately to blame for the ongoing “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. Further, they demanded that Israel refrain from any effort to wipe out Hamas by military means, on the premise that such an undertaking would inevitably result in too many collateral Palestinian civilian deaths. The proper response, the leftists counseled, would be for Israel to unilaterally bury its proverbial hatchet, pronounce its desire for an immediate bilateral ceasefire, and advocate for the renewal of peace negotiations aimed at creating a sovereign Palestinian state.
Among the most significant and influential leftists to take these positions were a coterie of nine relatively young Democrat members of the U.S. House of Representatives who informally have dubbed themselves “The Squad” – a term derived from hip-hop origins and signifying a shared set of far-left values and political objectives. The Squad was initially composed of four women who were elected to the House in 2018: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. They were later joined by Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri following the 2020 elections, and by Greg Casar of Texas, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, and Delia Ramirez of Illinois after the 2022 midterms. All nine Squad members were younger than age 50 when they were first elected to the U.S. House.
Because The Squad is, as ABC News explains, “an informal group of about nine progressive Democrats,” it “does not have a formal membership list, which makes detailing its representatives an inexact science.” For example, some news outlets have chosen, for various reasons, not to include Greg Casar or Delia Ramirez in their Squad member rolls. But many other outlets do include them. And, in light of the multitude of leftwing positions that Casar and Ramirez share with the other seven – particularly as regards Israel and the Jewish people – this report will consider them to be part of The Squad.
On many occasions, members of The Squad have:
This report examines the many words and actions by which members of The Squad have repeatedly articulated their deep, enduring antipathy for Israel and/or the Jews.
Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia on October 4, 1982 and was raised in the Islamic faith. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a party propagandist for Siad Barre, who ruled as the Marxist dictator of Somalia from 1969-1991. Moreover, Mr. Mohamed was a colonel in the Somali army in the 1970s and ’80s, during which time he received a military education in the Soviet Union. After Barre’s fall from power in 1991, Mohamed and his family spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp before subsequently migrating to America. Mohamed’s entry into the U.S. was illegal, however, because he never revealed his communist background on his Form N-400, Application for Naturalization, thereby violating the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965’s explicit prohibition against naturalization for anyone who, in the preceding ten years, had been “involved with the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party.”
As a teenager, Ilhan Omar enrolled at North Dakota State University (NDSU), where she joined the campus Muslim Students Association, a chapter of the national MSA organization which had been established in 1963 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood — an Islamic supremacist, Jew-hating entity that Islam expert Robert Spencer has described as “the parent organization of Hamas and al Qaeda.”
After earning a degree in political science and international studies at NDSU, Omar worked variously as a nutrition educator, a campaign manager for a Democrat state senator in Minnesota, and a policy aide to a Democrat city council member in Minneapolis, among other jobs.
In November 2016, Omar was elected to the Minnesota state legislature. Two years later, she ran successfully for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives — the seat formerly held by Keith Ellison, a fellow Muslim who had now decided to pursue the office of Minnesota attorney general. The 5th District, which included Minneapolis and some of its nearby suburbs, contained an estimated 100,000 people of Somali heritage, making it by far the largest Somali community in the United States. It was also a hotbed of political radicalism. In 2019, Fox News reported that “more men and boys from a Somali American community in Minneapolis have joined – or attempted to join – a foreign terrorist organization over the last 12 years than any other jurisdiction in the country.”
Omar’s radical politics were much to the liking of voters in the 5th District, as evidenced by the fact that she won three landslide elections from 2018 to 2022, capturing between 64 percent and 78 percent of all ballots in those races. Her radicalism was reflected in that fact that in April 2019, the lifelong Marxist revolutionary Angela Davis organized a rally in support of Omar. And the love was mutual, as evidenced when Omar said of Davis during that same event: “One of my idols!… I can’t tell you how enormously inspiring you have been to me throughout my life.”
Omar’s Track-Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
On November 16, 2012 – just a few days after Gaza-based Hamas terrorists had initiated the firing of more than 1,500 deadly rockets into the Jewish state, prompting a military response by Israel – Omar tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
During her tenure as a policy aide in the Minneapolis city council from 2013-2015, Omar acknowledged that she was a friend of several young men who, some years earlier, had joined al-Shabab, a Somali jihadist terror group allied with al Qaeda. “They were happy young men,” said Omar sympathetically. “And then at some point, something happened. And that is what needs to be researched and studied. What is happening to make them feel disconnected from a community that has birthed them, that has nurtured them?”
A few days after her election to the Minnesota House of Representatives in November 2016, Omar wrote a letter asking a Minneapolis judge to be lenient when sentencing nine young Somali-born men who had been convicted of attempting to join ISIS, the genocidal Islamic terrorist group dedicated to the mass slaughter of Christians and Jews. In her letter, Omar argued that long prison terms for these perpetrators would ultimately lead to the tragedy of unproductive lives and unrealized potential. “The desire to commit violence is not inherent to people,” she explained. “It is the consequence for [sic] alienation.”
Over the years, Omar has given multiple interviews to the Arab-American television host Ahmed Tharwat, known for characterizing Israel as the “Jewish ISIS” and claiming that the Nazi Holocaust brought enormous suffering to Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East: “What lots of Americans don’t understand is that anti-Semitism — the charge thrown causally at anyone who offers the slightest criticism of Israel — is an alien concept for most Muslims, since Arab/Muslims think of themselves not just as Semitic people, but also as indirect victims of the Holocaust atrocity, which led to establishing the Jewish state in the heart of the Middle East, beheading the nation of Palestine.”
In 2016, Omar stated that she was in favor of having the University of Minnesota completely divest its financial portfolio of Israel bonds.
As a member of the Minnesota legislature in 2017, Omar opposed a bill which was designed to counter economic boycotts targeting the Jewish state. While making her case against that legislation, she likened Israel to apartheid South Africa, where, years earlier, “so many people who understood that it was obviously immoral for countries to continue to support South Africa, ha[d] decided that they were going to engage in boycotts of that government, so that that system would go down.” Similarly, Omar explained, it was now entirely reasonable to suggest that comparable punitive measures would be “appropriate” for dealing with “the nuances of the people who are living in Israel and Palestine.”
Also in 2017, Omar was one of only two Minnesota House members — out of its 129 representatives – to vote against H.F. 1397, a bill designed to allow life-insurance companies to deny payouts to the beneficiaries of people who died while committing acts of terrorism. The bill was introduced in response to a 2015 case where an Islamic terrorist had taken out two life-insurance policies totaling $300,000 while in the midst of planning a mass shooting that would ultimately result in 14 deaths and 24 woundings in San Bernardino, California.
During a Democratic primary debate in August 2018, Omar was asked to specify “exactly where you stand” on the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative aiming to lay the psychological and rhetorical groundwork for:
Omar’s reply to the August 2018 debate question made it clear that she opposed BDS not because she thought it was morally wrong, but because she viewed it as a politically counterproductive strategy that was “not helpful in getting that two-state solution.”
But just five days after Omar won her congressional race in November 2018, the publication Muslim Girl reported that the newly elected lawmaker “believes in and supports the BDS movement.” When Lonny Goldsmith, the editor of the local Jewish news organization TC Jewfolk, asked Omar about the apparent discrepancy between her pre- and post-election stances, the congresswoman replied in a text message: “My position has always been the same. I believe and supports [sic] the BDS movement, and have fought to make sure people [sic] right to support it isn’t criminalized…. I do however, have reservations on [sic] effectiveness of the movement in accomplishing a lasting solution.”
Over the years, Omar has developed noteworthy ties to the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim extremist group co-founded in 1994 by individuals linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). The IAP, for its part, was a creation of senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and functioned as Hamas’ public-relations and recruitment arm in the United States.
Omar has opposed any U.S. efforts to use economic sanctions to punish Iran for its ties to international terrorism, or to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal of 2015. For example:
On January 31, 2019, Omar endorsed a series of tweets wherein liberal activist Max Berger had said: “Israel is like the [American] south before 1963: millions of people under Israeli control are denied the right to vote, speak freely or assemble because of their ethnicity. It’s a democracy for Jews only. That’s not a real democracy.” Sharing Berger’s remarks with her own 471,000+ followers on Twitter, the congresswoman wrote: “Many of them truly know this, but don’t want to accept it. In the same way many Americans knew separate yet equal was immoral but remained silent until [a] brave few were silent no more.”
On February 10, 2019, Omar tweeted her opinion that the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC — an American entity funded heavily by American Jews but not at all by the state of Israel — was guilty of paying U.S. politicians to take positions favorable to the Jewish state. “It’s all about the Benjamins [$100 bills], baby,” she wrote in a separate tweet quoting a 1997 song by the prominent rapper Puff Daddy.
On March 7, 2019, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke, applauding Omar for her repeated expressions of disdain for Israel and the Jewish people, tweeted: “By Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupation Government],[2] Ilhan Omar is NOW the most important Member of the US Congress!”
In July 2019, Omar introduced a House Resolution that: (a) supported the Hamas-inspired BDS movement’s promotion of what she called “our ability to exercise our First Amendment rights in regard to boycotting,” and (b) praised BDS as an initiative whose nobility was akin to that of past boycotts that had been directed against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and apartheid South Africa. This resolution was co-sponsored by fellow Squad member Rashida Tlaib.
When Israel in May 2021 launched a military campaign targeting infrastructure strongholds of the Gaza-based Hamas terrorists who had recently fired more than 4,300 Iranian-made rockets into the Jewish state, Omar went to the floor of the U.S. House and said: “In 1948, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were forcefully removed and uprooted from their homes in what has come to be known as the Nakba, or the Catastrophe…. Since then, 5.6 million Palestinians have been continually displaced from their homes in one of the largest and longest-lasting refugee crises in human history.” “It is a conflict,” she added, “where one country [Israel], funded and supported by the United States government, continues an illegal military occupation over another group of people.” But contrary to Omar’s claim, the notion of an Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian territory is an anachronistic fiction. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out, Hamas, after being elected to power in Gaza 18 years ago, cancelled all subsequent elections and has ruled the region as a dictatorship ever since – a dictatorship that forbids any Jews from even setting foot within the province of its domain. By contrast, some 2 million mostly Muslim Arabs currently live in Israel, the vast majority as Israeli citizens who enjoy the same rights and privileges as their Jewish counterparts.[3]
While questioning U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a video call on June 7, 2021, Omar said: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.” In response to Omar’s remarks, twelve Jewish Democrat members of the U.S. House together tweeted a statement criticizing the congresswoman for “placing the U.S. and Israel in the same category as Hamas and the Taliban.” Omar, in turn, condemned what she called her colleagues’ “shameful” and “offensive” “islamophobic tropes.”
In September 2021, Omar tweeted that the United States should not “provide Israel with funding without addressing the underlying issue of the occupation.”
On February 2, 2023, the House of Representatives voted 218-211 to remove Omar from her seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee by means of a resolution citing her past derogatory remarks about Jews and Israel. Every House Democrat voted against the measure, while 218 Republicans voted in favor of it, and one Republican voted “Present.”
Shortly after the infamous, murderous Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, Omar, drawing a moral equivalence between the terror group and the Jewish state, posted a social media statement lamenting that Hamas’ “horrific acts” and “senseless violence” were likely to perpetuate “the back and forth cycle we’ve seen.” “Deescalation and ceasefire,” she said, were the only sensible responses. In a separate October 7 post, Omar said: “Reminder, Gaza doesn’t have shelters or an iron dome and to please pray for them…. Palestinians are human beings who have been in besieged [sic] and are deserving of protection from the international community.”
After Israel warned Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to leave the region within 24 hours as the Jewish state prepared to initiate a military response against Hamas in the wake of October 7th, Omar accused Israel of laying the groundwork for “ethnic cleansing” and “an unspeakable humanitarian crisis.”
In October 2023 as well, Omar, demanding that Israel lay down its weapons and negotiate a peace deal with the terror group that had just slaughtered more than 1,200 people in a carefully orchestrated display of sadism and inhumanity, lamented: “We are watching an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe as a result of the Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Over a million [Palestinian] people have now been displaced from their homes, nearly 3,000 have been killed—1,000 of them children…. We must be clear: violence does not justify more violence. Killing innocent [Palestinian] children and civilians will only exacerbate the violence we have seen, and do nothing to bring about a political solution.”
That same month, Omar used her social media account to promote a rumor – which had already been debunked by unimpeachable video, audio, and radar evidence – falsely claiming that Israeli rocket fire had struck a Palestinian hospital in Gaza and killed hundreds of children therein. Specifically, she re-posted a tweet that cited, as “evidence” of the alleged carnage, a photograph of youngsters who had died in a sarin gas attack ordered by President Bashar al-Assad in Syria ten years earlier. In reality, the damage to the Palestinian hospital in question had resulted from a misfired rocket launched by the Gaza-based terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And the actual death toll was scarcely four-dozen, rather than the multiple hundreds claimed by Omar and her fellow Jew-haters.
On April 25, 2024, Omar visited and encouraged a large group of college students who had set up an anti-Israel, pro-Hamas encampment on the grounds of Columbia University in New York. One of them was the congresswoman’s own daughter, Isra Hirsi — a self-identified proud communist and “angry black girl” with a history of: (a) providing material support to the Marxist-anarchist Antifa movement; (b) advocating for a communist insurrection; (c) promoting the defunding of America’s police departments; and (d) calling for capitalism’s permanent dismantlement. Following her visit to the Columbia encampment, Rep. Omar used her X (formerly known as Twitter) account to praise the young activists for the “bravery and courage” they showed in “joyfully protesting for peace and an end to the genocide taking place in Gaza.”
In May 2024, Omar was pleased to hear President Joe Biden say, during an interview with CNN, that he was considering the possibility of limiting U.S. arms sales to Israel as a way to deter the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from entering the Gazan city of Rafah, where Hamas’ four remaining combat battalions were cornered, and crushing the last remnants of the terror group once and for all. Said Biden in the interview: “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of [the] ways in which they [the Israelis] go after population centers. And … I’ve made it clear to Bibi [Netanyahu] and the [Israeli] War Cabinet, they’re not going to get our support if, in fact, they go into these population centers.” Celebrating Biden’s remarks, Omar posted a message on X in which she said: “This is what young people across the country were protesting for and finally the needle has moved in a significant way. I hope we see more progress, but don’t ever let people tell you that your voices are meaningless and your actions are worthless. The arc of what is possible is always within us to bend.”
The eldest of 14 children, Rashida Tlaib was born to Muslim parents on July 24, 1976 in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother hailed from a region near the West Bank city of Ramallah, and her father was born in an Israeli suburb outside of Jerusalem.
After earning a J.D. degree from Thomas Cooley Law School in 2004, Tlaib found employment as a social worker before taking jobs at the International Institute of Metro Detroit, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, and the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice. At the latter location, a majority of Tlaib’s co-workers were, by her description, “pretty much socialists” whom she “love[d].”
In October 2006, Tlaib was a guest columnist who contributed an op-ed piece to The Final Call, the newspaper and website of the Jew-hating Nation Of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan.
In 2008, Tlaib was the Arab-American outreach coordinator for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in Michigan. Later that year, Tlaib herself was elected, as a Democrat, to the Michigan House of Representatives, where she would serve from 2009-2015.
Tlaib is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which in 2018 endorsed her campaign for Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. At a February 2018 DSA meeting in Detroit, Tlaib was asked if she planned to openly “run as a socialist.” She replied: “Yeah, um it’s, it’s — we got to win.” Tlaib then lamented that “people have tainted that word,” and she said she considered it her duty to proudly “explain [that] the labor movement was founded on socialism.”
On November 6, 2018, Tlaib won the general election for her congressional race with 84.6 percent of the vote.
Tlaib’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
Over the course of her political life, Tlaib has developed notable ties to a number of Jew-hating Islamist organizations. For example:
In an October 2015 tweet, Tlaib linked her post to an article in The Nation lauding Black Lives Matter activists in Chicago for supporting “a Palestinian woman threatened with deportation.” The woman in question was Rasmea Odeh of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a pro-Palestinian, Marxist-Leninist terror group based in Damascus. Odeh had played a central role in a deadly 1969 bombing that killed two Israeli university students in Jerusalem.
In December 2017, Tlaib shared a Facebook post in which Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, a staunch ally of the BDS movement, had expressed support for Ahed Tamimi, a 17-year-old Palestinian girl whom Israeli authorities had recently incarcerated for assaulting an IDF soldier and proclaiming that “everyone must” attack Israeli Jews by means of “stabbings, martyrdom-seeking operations [i.e. suicide bombings], throwing stones.” “Absolutely inhumane to target a young girl for fighting against racist [Israeli] policies,” wrote Tlaib. “Her [Tamimi’s] voice should be lifted.”
In February 2018, Tlaib joined a Facebook group called the Palestinian American Congress, an entity with a well-earned reputation for demonizing Jews. The group’s founder, Maher Abdel-qader: (a) served as a donor, fundraiser, and event organizer for Tlaib’s 2018 congressional campaign; (b) has accused Israeli settlers of training children “to terrorize Palestinian civilians”; and (c) has used his social media to share videos and images comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and promoting the notion that Jews are a “satanic” people with no historical claim to Israel.
By August 2018, Tlaib and her congressional campaign had raised — for that election cycle — more than $30,000 from Islamists affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Islamic Society of North America, and the Muslim American Society (MAS) – all of which have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
When Tlaib won her congressional election on November 6, 2018, Nihad Awad, the founder and CEO of Hamas-linked CAIR, congratulated her on her “historic victory of becoming the first Muslim and Palestinian woman in the U.S. Congress.”
In December 2018, Tlaib became just the second U.S. lawmaker — the first was Ilhan Omar — to publicly voice support for the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement. “I personally support the BDS movement,” Tlaib said in an interview with The Intercept.
On January 3, 2019 — her first official day as a new Member of Congress — Tlaib told a raucous crowd of supporters near Capitol Hill that Donald Trump’s days as U.S. president were numbered: “We’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”
When she was sworn into office, Tlaib wore a red thobe (a traditional Palestinian gown) and took her oath by placing her right hand on a copy of the Koran, rather than a Bible. That same day, a member of Tlaib’s entourage affixed, onto a wall map in the new congresswoman’s office, a post-it bearing the word “Palestine” along with an arrow pointing at Israel, so as to indicate that “Palestine” was Israel’s rightful name.
A notable attendee at Tlaib’s swearing-in ceremony was the Jew-hating activist Abbas Hamideh, who has: (a) stated his belief that “Israel does not have a right to exist”; (b) equated Zionism with Nazism and the genocidal ideology of ISIS; and (c) described Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah as “the most honorable Arab-Muslim leader of our lifetime.” Following the ceremony, Hamideh posted to his Twitter account a photo of himself and Tlaib holding up a large painting of the newly elected lawmaker. He also attended a private celebratory dinner with Tlaib, her family, and a number of her friends and activist supporters.
During the first week of January 2019, Tlaib used her Twitter account to condemn her congressional colleagues who backed a bill designed to allow local, state, and federal agencies to avoid doing business with companies or organizations that supported the Hamas-inspired BDS movement against Israel. “They forgot what country they represent,” Tlaib tweeted. “This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.”
In March 2019, Tlaib posed for a photograph with Palestinian activist Nader Jalajel, who in February 2018 had: (a) openly mourned the death of Hamas terrorist Ahmed Jarrar, the leader of a then-recent fatal shooting of a rabbi in Israel, and (b) praised the heroic Jarrar for his “long battle resisting the brutal Israeli occupation and defending his people and his land.” Jalajel would later go on to articulate similar sentiments in August 2019, when he posted the capitalized words “LONG LIVE THE RESISTANCE!!!” in honor of four Gaza-based Hamas terrorists who had been killed by Israeli security forces after entering the Jewish state with rifles, grenades, and anti-tank rockets.
In July 2019, Tlaib co-sponsored a House Resolution introduced by fellow Squad member Ilhan Omar, casting the Hamas-inspired BDS movement as the heir apparent to the noble tradition of boycotts that, in ages past, had been directed against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and apartheid South Africa.
In July 2019 as well, Tlaib was one of just 17 House Members who voted against House Resolution 246, a Democrat-sponsored bill that explicitly opposed BDS. In an impassioned speech which she delivered just prior to the vote, Tlaib condemned Israel’s “racist policies” and emphasized how monumentally important previous boycotts had been, saying: “What was the Boston Tea Party but a boycott? Where would we be now without the boycotts led by the civil rights activists in the 1950s and ’60s?” To further bolster her case against Israel, she went so far as to invoke the memory of Adolf Hitler’s barbarism: “Americans boycotted Nazi Germany in response to the dehumanization, imprisonment and genocide of the Jewish people.”
In August 2019, Tlaib and fellow Squad member Ilhan Omar shunned a bipartisan congressional delegation to Israel and announced that they instead would jointly schedule an independent trip – sponsored by the anti-Israel organization Miftah – to the Jewish state. But Israel’s government – in accordance with a national law barring the issuance of visas to any foreigners who, like Tlaib and Omar, advocated boycotts targeting Israel – declared that the pair would not be permitted to enter the country. Shortly thereafter, Israeli authorities — in response to a written plea wherein Tlaib requested special permission to visit her elderly grandmother in the West Bank village of Beit-Ur al-Fauqa — softened its stance and agreed to allow the two lawmakers into the country. But Tlaib promptly rejected the offer, tweeting: “When I won [election to Congress], it gave the Palestinian people hope that someone will finally speak the truth about the inhumane conditions. I can’t allow the State of Israel to take away that light by humiliating me & use my love for my [grandmother] to bow down to their oppressive & racist policies. Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in — fighting against racism, oppression & injustice.”
In late November 2020, Tlaib and Omar spoke at a conference held by the Hamas-linked American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) — an event that also featured appearances by Tarek Hammoud, executive director of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Return Center, and Kifah Mustapha, an individual with close ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee.
In December 2020, Tlaib and Omar both participated in an online, pro-Democrat “vote-a-thon” co-hosted by the Georgia chapter of CAIR. “I hope that you realize just the opportunity here that Allah has given us to show the power of Muslims in Georgia,” Tlaib stated during the event.
On May 5, 2021, Tlaib retweeted an article that cited Palestinian media sources claiming that Israeli “settlers” had set massive, destructive fires on Palestinian lands. Tlaib herself wrote that these acts of “racist violence” were “the actions of an apartheid state.” It was subsequently learned that the fires had actually been started by Palestinian arsonists.
When Israel in May 2021 initiated a military assault against Gaza-based Hamas terrorists who had recently shot thousands of Iranian-made rockets into the Jewish state, Tlaib, wearing a keffiyeh – a symbol of Palestinian “liberation” popularized by the prolific Jew-killer Yasser Arafat — went to the floor of the U.S. House to condemn “Israel’s apartheid government” and advocate for the launch of a devastating BDS campaign. “As long as the message from Washington is that our military support for Israel is unconditional,” she warned, “Netanyahu’s extremism right-wing government will continue to expand settlements, continue to demolish homes, and continue to make the prospects for peace impossible.”
When she voted against a September 2021 bill that authorized U.S. spending to support the enhancement of Israel’s missile-defense capabilities, Tlaib said: “We cannot be talking only about Israelis’ need for safety at a time when Palestinians are living under a violent apartheid system, and are dying from … war crimes.”
On May 16, 2022, Tlaib introduced a House Resolution stipulating that Israel’s creation 74 years earlier should be officially classified as a Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” for the Palestinian people.
On May 1, 2023, Tlaib tweeted that: “[T]he apartheid state of Israel was born out of violence and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. 75 years later, the Nakba continues to this day.”
Soon after the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, Tlaib, shifting blame for the atrocities onto Israel, sought to dissuade the Jewish state from mounting any kind of forceful military response. Specifically, she implored Israel to begin “lifting the blockade, ending the occupation, and dismantling the [Israeli] apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that can lead to resistance.” “The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer,” Tlaib added. “… As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
On the evening of October 10, 2023 in the U.S. Capitol building, Fox News correspondent Hillary Vaughn repeatedly asked Tlaib to comment on reports that Hamas terrorists — in the course of the aforementioned campaign of butchery on October 7th — had murdered dozens of Jewish babies, decapitating many of them. Tlaib remained silent and ignored the questions, scurrying with her entourage to an elevator where she escaped Vaughn’s microphone and camera.
At a pro-Hamas rally outside the U.S. Capitol on October 18, 2023, Tlaib called for an immediate ceasefire in the newly erupted Israel-Hamas conflict. In her speech, the congresswoman repeated the false allegation that Israel, while carrying out its military reprisal for the October 7th Hamas attacks, had bombed a Gaza hospital and killed some 500 civilians in the process. But U.S. and Israeli intelligence sources had already demonstrated conclusively – with video, audio, and radar evidence – that the strike in question had been caused not by Israel, but by a misfired rocket launched by the Gaza-based terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Moreover, the actual death toll was about 50, and nowhere near 500. Nevertheless, Tlaib tearfully told the crowd in attendance: “We continue to watch people think it’s OK to bomb a hospital with children…. If we’re not crying, something is wrong.” Five days later, Tlaib declared: “I cannot uncritically accept Israel’s denials of responsibility as fact…. Both the Israeli and United States governments have long, documented histories of misleading the public about wars and war crimes …”
On November 3, 2023, Tlaib used her X social media account to post a video in which she demanded that President Biden call for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian war, so as to stop “the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
On November 6, 2023, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick of Georgia introduced a privileged resolution to censure Tlaib for having repeatedly used anti-Semitic rhetoric while criticizing Israel’s military response to the October 7th attacks by Hamas. After a motion to table the resolution failed on November 7th, the House conducted a final vote on the measure later that evening, and it passed by a margin of 234 to 188.
On January 31, 2024, Tlaib and fellow Squad member Cori Bush were the only two U.S. House members to vote against the Republican-sponsored H.R. 6679, The No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act, which passed in the House by a margin of 422-2. Aiming to build upon an already-existing statute barring members of designated terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from entering the United States for any reason at all, the bill sought to extend the ban to also cover members of the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as anyone who had “carried out, participated in, planned, financed, afforded material support to, or otherwise facilitated any of the attacks against Israel initiated by Hamas beginning on October 7, 2023.” Claiming that “H.R. 6679 is unnecessary because it is redundant with already existing federal law,” Tlaib described the legislation as “just another GOP messaging bill being used to incite anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim hatred that makes communities like ours unsafe.”
On February 14, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed — by a vote of 418 to 0 — a bipartisan resolution condemning Hamas’ use of rape and sexual violence against Jews during and after its deadly October 7, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel. The only House member not to support the measure was Tlaib, who voted “Present,” explaining that she could not back the resolution because it “completely ignores and erases any sexual violence and abuse committed by the Israeli forces against Palestinians, especially children.” The Times of Israel, however, pointed out that “while the evidence and testimony of horrific sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 have been widely documented, there have been no credible reports of sexual violence perpetrated by the IDF in Gaza.”
On April 10, 2024, Fox News correspondent Hillary Vaughn asked Tlaib to comment on a recent al-Quds Day rally in Dearborn, Michigan — which was part of Tlaib’s congressional district — where chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” had been prominently featured. Tlaib refused to answer, instead intoning several variations of “I don’t talk to Fox News” because of its alleged promotion of “Islamophobic” themes and “racist tropes.”
In the spring of 2024, Tlaib spoke out in support of the many college students who had been staging anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, pro-ceasefire demonstrations on their respective campuses. For example, after police on May 7th had arrested approximately 130 such activists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst plus another 33 at George Washington University, the congresswoman held a press conference on May 8th where she said: “These students are saying, ‘Save lives,’ no matter faith or ethnicity. This is something that I feel like is being completely ignored. Why are they out there? This is why we’re proud. We’re proud to use our position in office to bring these voices so you all don’t forget why there are [anti-Israel] encampments [on college campuses], why there are movements and dissent around this country.”
On May 25, 2024 in Detroit, Tlaib gave a speech at the People’s Conference for Palestine, an event that received funding and support from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a Marxist-Leninist terror group headquartered in Syria. During her talk at the conference, Tlaib referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “genocidal maniac” who was guilty of “crimes against humanity.” She also condemned the United States for sending Israel “billions of dollars to maintain an apartheid government and support the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.” The keynote speaker at the event was Sana’ Daqqa, widow of PFLP terrorist Walid Daqqa, who had died a few weeks earlier from a terminal illness while serving out a life sentence in an Israeli jail. The late Mr. Daqqa was part of a PFLP cell that in 1984 had kidnapped Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam, gouged out his eyes, and then castrated him before shooting him dead.
Born in the Bronx on October 13, 1989, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was raised in Yorktown Heights — an affluent, mostly-white town in Westchester County, New York. Following the death of her father in September 2008, she went on to earn degrees in economics and international relations at Boston University. During her time as a student there, she also worked as an aide for the late Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts on matters involving immigration and foreign affairs.
After graduating from college in 2011, Ocasio-Cortez returned to her hometown and took jobs as a bartender and waitress to supplement her mother’s modest income. In 2012 she founded Brook Avenue Press (BAP), a publishing company for children’s books – which never actually produced even a single book. The state of New York dissolved BAP in 2016 because the company had failed to file its tax returns and pay its corporate taxes.
Ocasio-Cortez also began to establish herself as a community organizer, most notably as a result of her 2016 participation in demonstrations against proposals to situate a portion of the Dakota Access [Oil] Pipeline within the confines of North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Recognizing Ocasio-Cortez’s potential for eventually blossoming into a charismatic political figure, the newly formed leftist organizations Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats encouraged her to run for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. That same year, the young woman served as an organizer for Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid.
In early 2018, Ocasio-Cortez ran a successful campaign for a U.S. House seat representing New York’s heavily Democratic 14th Congressional District, defeating 19-year congressional veteran Joe Crowley in the Democrat primary before coasting to victory in the November general election.
Ocasio-Cortez’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
When the Israeli military on May 14, 2018 killed approximately 60 people who were among the many thousands of rioters violently protesting the Trump administration’s decision to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, then-congressional candidate Ocasio-Cortez condemned the Jewish state in a tweet that said: “This is a massacre…. No state or entity is absolved of mass shootings of protesters. There is no justification. Palestinian people deserve basic human dignity, as anyone else.”
In a July 2018 interview on PBS, Ocasio-Cortez falsely claimed that Israel was illegally occupying a place called Palestine: “I also think that what people are starting to see, at least in the occupation of Palestine, is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition, and that to me is just where I tend to come from on this issue.” Asked to explain her use of the word “occupation,” she replied, “Oh, um, I think what I meant is, like, the settlements that are increasing in some of these areas and places where, um, Palestinians are experiencing difficulty in access to their housing and homes.” When she was then asked to “expand on that,” the congressional candidate said, with a laugh: “I am not the expert on geopolitics on this issue. You know, for me, I’m a firm believer in finding a two-state solution in this issue. And I’m happy to sit down with leaders on both of these — for me, I just look at things through a human rights lens, and I may not use the right words.”
In May 2021, when Israel was engaged in a military campaign targeting Gaza-based Hamas terrorists who had recently fired thousands of Iranian-made rockets into the Jewish state, Ocasio-Cortez went to the floor of the U.S. House and exhorted the Biden administration to acknowledge America’s role in having enabled the injustices and human rights violations allegedly inflicted upon the Palestinians by Israel. Among her remarks were the following: “This is not about both sides. This is about an imbalance of power…. [D]o Palestinians have a right to survive? Do we believe that?”
On May 19, 2021, Ocasio-Cortez introduced a measure in the U.S. House to block America from selling Israel a $735 million weapons kit capable of converting unguided or “dumb” bombs into precision-guided munitions. She was supported in this initiative by fellow Squad members Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
When Ilhan Omar was criticized by some fellow Democrats in June 2021 for drawing a moral equivalence between the “unthinkable atrocities” and “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by “the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Ocasio-Cortez came to Omar’s defense, tweeting: “Pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of @IlhanMN coming from our caucus.”
On October 7, 2023 — shortly after Hamas terrorists had murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in a series of surprise attacks, prompting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to declare that the Jewish state was now officially “at war” — Ocasio-Cortez issued a statement saying that Israel’s “violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region.” The only reasonable and prudent course of action, she explained, would be “an immediate ceasefire and deescalation.”
On October 12, 2023, Ocasio-Cortez used her X social media account to post a message saying that “the United States has a responsibility to ensure [Israel’s] accountability to human rights — to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and to ensure that horrors do not happen in the names of [Israeli] victims [from October 7] who do not want their tragedy used to justify further [Israeli] violence and injustice.”
On October 31, 2023, the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), published a social media post criticizing Ocasio-Cortez and the additional handful of mostly Democrat lawmakers who had chosen not to support a recent House Resolution reaffirming America’s allegiance to Israel “as it defends itself against the barbaric war launched by Hamas and other terrorists.” Ocasio-Cortez, in turn, wrote on social media that AIPAC was not only “one of the more racist and bigoted PACs in Congress … who disproportionately target members of color,” but was also “an extremist organization that destabilizes US democracy.”
In a December 2023 Instagram post, Ocasio-Cortez characterized the Israeli soldiers who continued to battle Hamas militants in Gaza as violent “right-wing” barbarians: “In the story of Christmas,” she elaborated, “Christ was born in modern-day Palestine under the threat of a government engaged in a massacre of innocents. He was part of a targeted population being indiscriminately killed to protect an unjust leader’s power. Mary and Joseph, displaced by violence and forced to flee, became refugees in Egypt with a newborn waiting to one day return home. Thousands of years later, right-wing forces are violently occupying Bethlehem as similar stories unfold for today’s Palestinians …”
During a January 28, 2024 television interview on Meet The Press, NBC News anchor Kristen Welker asked Ocasio-Cortez if she thought that the Israeli military’s ongoing campaign against Hamas in Gaza constituted a “genocide.” Citing statistics furnished by Hamas, the congresswoman replied: “I think what we are seeing right now throughout the country is that young people are appalled at the violence and the indiscriminate loss of life. We are not just seeing 25,000 people that have died in Gaza. We are seeing the starvation of millions of people, the displacement of over 2 million Gazans…. The ICJ [International Court of Justice] ruled this week that Israel has a grave responsibility to prevent genocide.”
On February 7, 2024, Ocasio-Cortez said of Israel’s continuing military incursion against Hamas targets in Gaza: “We are seeing a level of depravity in Gaza that is becoming morally untenable to support.”
During a speech she delivered in the House of Representatives on March 22, 2024, Ocasio-Cortez said of the situation in Gaza: “If you want to know what an unfolding [Israeli] genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million [Palestinian] innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away.”
On April 20, 2024, Ocasio-Cortez voted against H.R. 8034, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which called for: “replacing defense articles that were provided to Israel”; “reimbursing DOD [Department of Defense] for defense services and training provided to Israel”; “procuring Israel’s Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Iron Beam defense systems to counter short-range rocket threats”; and “procuring advanced weapons systems, defense articles, and defense services for Israel.” Ocasio-Cortez and fellow Squad member Greg Casar were among 19 Democrats who released the following statement after voting against H.R. 8034:
“Our votes against H.R. 8034 are votes against supplying more offensive weapons that could result in more killings of civilians in Rafah and elsewhere…. Benjamin Netanyahu appears willing to sacrifice the hostages while inflicting extraordinary suffering on the people of Gaza. He is willing to expand this conflict to preserve his power at the expense of Israel’s safety.”
In April 2024 as well, Ocasio-Cortez was outraged when Columbia University president Minouche Shafik threatened to request that police officers and National Guard troops be deployed to disperse the student demonstrators who had set up a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia’s campus. Those students were not only protesting America’s support for Israel in the latter’s ongoing war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but also demanding that Columbia divest its financial portfolio of all Israel-affiliated assets. “Calling in police enforcement on nonviolent demonstrations of young students on campus is an escalatory, reckless, and dangerous act,” the congresswoman wrote on her X social media page on April 23. “It represents a heinous failure of leadership that puts people’s lives at risk. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”
On June 22, 2024, Ocasio-Cortez took part in a South Bronx campaign rally on behalf of fellow Squad member Jamaal Bowman. Depicting AIPAC — which had donated millions of dollars to George Latimer, Bowman’s opponent in that year’s Democratic Party primary — as an organization that was seeking to buy the election for Latimer, Ocasio-Cortez shouted: “We’re gonna win, we’re gonna take on AIPAC, and we’re gonna kick some Wall Street ass!”
In a September 18, 2024 post on the social media site X, Ocasio-Cortez condemned Israel for a September 17 attack in which it had remotely and simultaneously blown up pagers used by hundreds of Hezbollah members in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people and wounding several thousand — most of whom were officials within, or affiliates of, the terrorist organization. Wrote the congresswoman:
“Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon detonated thousands of handheld devices across of a slew of public spaces, seriously injuring and killing innocent civilians. This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict. Congress needs a full accounting of the attack, including an answer from the State Department as to whether any US assistance went into the development or deployment of this technology.”
Ayanna Pressley was born on February 3, 1974 in Chicago, Illinois. After attending Boston University from 1992-1994, she worked as a senior aide for Democrat Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, and then as political director for U.S. Senator John Kerry. Pressley subsequently went on to serve in leadership positions with groups like the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, Young Professionals Preventing Child Abuse, and the Children’s Trust Fund.
In 2009 Pressley was elected as an at-large representative on the Boston city council, a post she went on to hold for nine years. In 2018 she ran successfully for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, easily defeating ten-term incumbent Michael Capuano before running unopposed in the general election.
Pressley’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
In the summer of 2019, Pressley began attending events in Boston sponsored by IfNotNow, an organization claiming that “the Israeli government, with the backing of the U.S. government, subjects Palestinians across the entire land to apartheid — a system of inequality and ongoing displacement that is connected to a racial and class hierarchy amongst Israelis.” Later that year, Pressley spoke at a Hanukkah party hosted by IfNotNow, and she described herself as a “sister in solidarity” with the group’s activists.
When Israel responded militarily to a massive wave of rockets that Hamas had launched from Gaza into the Jewish state in May 2021, Pressley went to the floor of the House of Representatives and said: “Palestinians are being told the same thing as black folks in America: ‘There is no acceptable form of resistance.’ […] The pain, trauma, and terror that Palestinians are facing is not just a result of this week’s escalation, but the consequence of years of military occupation. […] We cannot remain silent when our government sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children, and displace Palestinian families. A budget is a reflection of our values. I’m committed to ensuring that our government does not fund state violence in any form, anywhere.”
When Squad member Ilhan Omar was criticized by some fellow House Democrats in June 2021 for drawing a moral equivalence between the “unthinkable atrocities” and “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by “the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Pressley tweeted the following message to those critics: “Stop the bad faith attempts to take @IlhanMN’s words out of context. She called a simple question. […] Imagine if Congress was as outraged by what Palestinians endure daily.”
In October 2023, Pressley, demanding that the Jewish state put an end to its military assault against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorists who had recently killed more than 1,200 Israelis in a coordinated series of attacks, again drew a moral equivalence between Israel, the United States, and Hamas: “The loss of every Palestinian, Israeli, and American life we have seen in the past week is absolutely devastating and the grief and trauma in our communities is palpable. The murder of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas is horrific and unacceptable. And the murder of innocent Palestinian civilians is a horrific and unacceptable response.”
On February 29, 2024, Pressley condemned the civilian deaths that allegedly continued to mount as a result of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas targets in Gaza. Citing highly inflated casualty statistics provided by the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Ministry of Health, the congresswoman said: “Our hearts cannot begin to account for the loss of over 30,000 Palestinians – two-thirds of whom are women and children – who have been heinously killed by the Israeli military’s relentless and indiscriminate bombing campaign. Over 11,000 children have been killed in Gaza – a horror that defies explanation.” Appearing to choke with emotion, she then added: “A child is killed every 15 minutes in Gaza. We cannot look away. Think of these babies who are sleeping in their cribs, wearing diapers or running for their lives when they were struck by a missile or shot by a sniper. What has happened to our humanity?” “Vengeance is not a foreign policy doctrine,” Pressley continued, “and we cannot bomb our way to peace. History has shown us that time and time again. Diplomacy is the only path forward, and that must begin with an immediate, lasting and indefinite ceasefire now.”
On April 26, 2024, Pressley spoke out in support of the hundreds of students and professors who in recent weeks had been arrested for staging anti-Israel, pro-Hamas, pro-ceasefire demonstrations at dozens of college and university campuses across the United States. Said Pressley:
“Peaceful protest is a central tenet of our democracy and students standing for justice have often been a catalyst for much-needed change. From the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, the struggle for gender equality, and the movement for Black lives, to the global movement for peace in Israel and Palestine, many of the rights we tout today were earned thanks to the sweat equity of students demonstrating on college campuses across the nation….
“I am grateful to students nationwide and across the Massachusetts 7th [Congressional District]—at Emerson, Northeastern, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Harvard, and more—who are raising their voices and putting their bodies on the line to press for action to save lives in Gaza. That is what this movement is about. We cannot lose sight of the horrific injustices that Palestinians in Gaza are facing and I am proud to stand in solidarity with peaceful protestors.”
Jamaal Bowman was born on April 1, 1976 in New York City, where he and his siblings were raised by a single mother in an East Harlem housing project. After earning a bachelor’s degree in sports management from the University of New Haven in 1999, Bowman began working as an educator in New York City before proceeding to earn a master’s degree in guidance counseling from Mercy College, and a Doctor of Education degree from Manhattanville College.
In September 2009, Bowman founded the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action (CASA), a public middle school in the northeast Bronx, where he went on to serve as principal for about a decade. During his tenure there, Bowman honored the convicted cop-killer, Marxist militant, and former Black Liberation Army member Joanne Chesimard — a.k.a. Assata Shakur — by including her photograph on the school’s so-called “Wall of Heroes.”
A confirmed socialist and a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Bowman, inspired by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s spectacularly successful run for Congress in 2018, left his job with CASA in 2019 and launched a campaign to challenge Eliot Engel — a 16-term incumbent U.S. House member representing New York’s heavily Democratic 16th Congressional District — in the 2020 Democrat primary. After defeating Engel, Bowman trounced Conservative Party candidate Patrick McMaunus by a margin of 84 percent to 15.8 percent in the general election.
In a June 2020 interview with The Intercept, Bowman was asked, “Are you a socialist?” He replied, “Yes … my policies align with those of a socialist… I’m an educator. It just so happens my policy aligns with socialism. I guess I’m a socialist. I identify as an educator, and as a black man in America. But my policies align with those of a socialist, so I guess that makes me a socialist. All good.”
On June 25, 2024, Westchester County Executive George Latimer defeated Bowman in the Democratic Party primary for New York’s 16th Congressional District seat, by a margin of approximately 17 percentage points. He will continue to serve in office until his current term comes to a close in January 2025, at which point his tenure in the U.S. House will end.
Bowman’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
In May 2021, while Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists were firing thousands of rockets from Gaza into Israel, Bowman denounced the Jewish state’s military response as an assault on the “black and brown bodies” of Palestinians.
When Squad member Ilhan Omar was criticized by some fellow House Democrats in June 2021 for drawing a moral equivalence between the “unthinkable atrocities” and “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by “the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Bowman tweeted in Omar’s defense: “When a woman, person of color or Muslim speaks out against injustice, backlash ensues. When @IlhanMN speaks out, the vitriol is compounded by her being all three. As Democrats, we must recognize the biases that fuel personal attacks and defend our colleagues.”
On October 16, 2023, Bowman condemned Israel for responding militarily to the unprovoked Hamas terror attacks that had killed more than 1,200 Israelis nine days earlier. “The events that have unfolded over the past week in Israel and Gaza,” he said, are horrifying violations of human rights and international law that have resulted in the devastating loss of thousands of civilian lives. We must do everything in our power to end this ongoing violence.”
During a November 17, 2023 rally in White Plains, New York, Bowman called Israel an “apartheid” state and angrily claimed that reports accusing Hamas of having committed rapes and child murders during its infamous October 7th terror attacks were false. “There was propaganda used at the beginning of the siege,” Bowman shouted. “There’s still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women, but they still keep using the lie.” He also accused Israel of committing war crimes: “To cut off food is a war crime. To cut off water is a crime. To not allow energy to go into hospitals is a war crime.”
Contrary to Bowman’s claim that reports of Hamas terrorists sexually abusing Israelis were nothing more than fabrications and exaggerations, a March 2024 report issued by the United Nations stated that it had uncovered “clear and convincing information that sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment has been committed against [Israeli] hostages.” The report further noted that: (a) “in most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses”; (b) there were “reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing against those still held in captivity”; and (c) “credible circumstantial information, which may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including genital mutilation, sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment was also gathered.” Moreover, a two-month investigation conducted by The New York Times found a “pattern of rape, mutilation, and extreme brutality” committed by Hamas operatives against Israeli women.
During a November 21, 2023 appearance on MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight, Bowman emphasized the urgent need “to do the work to actually get to [the establishment of] a state for Palestinians.” Later in the broadcast, he added: “[E]ven before I went to the West Bank … I spoke to Israeli and Palestinian scholars over the phone just to learn more about it. And one of them — I forget his name — told me that we’re at the Civil Rights Era moment here in the West Bank. This is like Jim Crow.”
After 119 student protesters at Columbia University were arrested during an April 19, 2024 anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstration where they damaged campus property and ignored multiple demands stating that they should disperse, Bowman rebuked the school’s administrators for having the students apprehended. “I’m very concerned with some of Columbia’s actions,” he said. “They seem to be folding to pressure from a right wing Congress’ weaponizing of the unfolding events in the Middle East as a means to suppress fundamental freedoms of expression.” Moreover, Bowman characterized a recent U.S. House committee hearing at which Columbia president Minouche Shafik had testified, as “nothing more than an act of political theater, once again, designed only to further long-standing Republican attacks on education justice in this country.”
Also in April 2024, Bowman refused to vote in support of a House Resolution condemning a recent attack in which Iran had launched more than 300 missiles and drones toward Israel. “Instead of pushing resolutions that fan the flames of war,” he said, “Congress should recognize all of the lives that have been lost, both Palestinian and Israeli. We have a moral responsibility to govern in a way that centers those most impacted and nurtures humanity instead of succumbing to more warmongering and violence.”
In a June 2024 interview with leftwing YouTube host Olayemi Olurin, Bowman justified his November 2, 2023 decision — in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7th – to vote against a House Resolution to “condemn the support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations at institutions of higher education,” where the presence of such support was likely to create what the resolution described as “a hostile environment for Jewish students, faculty, and staff.” “One of the first lines [of the resolution],” Bowman said in the interview, “was ‘condemn Hamas for this unprovoked attack.’[4] And I stopped reading at that point. If we’re calling this an unprovoked attack, that means we’re going to ignore 18 human rights organizations calling Israel an apartheid state.” “There was no way in the world,” he added, “especially based on what I’ve learned over the last few years in Congress, that I was going to support what Israel was doing right now. Now, I am not justifying the killing of civilians by Hamas on October 7. There’s no justification. It’s just an explanation of what the circumstances were that led to October 7. And I believed then, and I believe now, if you want to end extremism, we need a free Palestine.”
In a June 22, 2024 campaign rally in the South Bronx, Bowman, demanding that Israel call an end to its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, shouted, “Ceasefire now, let’s get it poppin’!” He also directed some harsh words at the Jewish lobby AIPAC, which had spent large sums of money supporting George Latimer, Bowman’s challenger in the 2024 Democratic primary. “We are gonna show fucking AIPAC the power of the mother fucking South Bronx,” Bowman thundered. “… We gonna show them who the fuck we are!”
Born on July 21, 1976, in St. Louis, Missouri, Cori Bush studied at Harris–Stowe State University for one year (1995–1996) and subsequently worked at a preschool until 2001. She eventually earned a diploma from the St. Louis-based Lutheran School of Nursing in 2008 and became a registered nurse. Bush also became an ordained minister and served three years as pastor of the Kingdom Embassy International Church (KEIC), a St. Louis-area house of worship that she founded in 2011.
In 2014, Bush, who has great affection for the lifelong communist revolutionary Angela Davis, shifted her principal focus from KEIC to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. She became a leading BLM organizer in the St. Louis area, a cause that she subsequently characterized as “my ministry.”
After running unsuccessfully as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2016 and the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, Bush was elected to the House in 2020.
On August 6, 2024, Wesley Bell, a prosecuting attorney in St. Louis County, defeated Bush in the Democratic Party primary for Missouri’s 1st Congressional District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Bell received 51.2 percent of all votes, while Bush garnered 45.6 percent. Bush will continue to serve in office until her current term comes to a close in January 2025, at which point her tenure in the U.S. House will end.
Bush’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
Cori Bush is a supporter of the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement. On one page of her 2020 congressional campaign website, she lamented that BDS had been “mischaracterize[d] and demonize[d] by its opponents.” “I stand by the right of Palestinians to live as a free people just as the people of Israel and we as U.S. citizens are allowed to do,” the page read. “We also stand by their right to call for a boycott on goods and services that the government that is currently oppressing them profits from, in order to draw attention to their plight.” The same page noted Bush’s support for the Iran nuclear deal, and her condemnation of “our [America’s] imperialist foreign policy and the runaway influence of the military-industrial complex.”
On May 19, 2021, Bush co-sponsored a bill seeking to block the United States from selling arms to Israel. Other co-sponsors of the bill included fellow Squad members Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.
When Ilhan Omar was criticized by some fellow House Democrats in June 2021 for drawing a moral equivalence between the “unthinkable atrocities” and “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by “the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban,” Bush came to Omar’s defense, tweeting: “Stop attacking @IlhanMN. Stop attacking us. I’m not surprised when Republicans attack Black women for standing up for human rights. But when it’s Democrats, it’s especially hurtful…. Enough with the anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.”
On March 7, 2023, the New York Post reported that Bush, during the preceding two years, had paid a total of $137,000 to her friend Nathaniel Davis III, a member of the notoriously anti-Semitic New Black Panther Party, in exchange for his services as a security guard. Describing himself as a “spiritual guru” and calling himself Aha Sen Piankhy, Davis claimed to be 109 trillion years old and professed an ability to read minds, teach “psychic self-defense” against “telepathic and telekinetic attacks,” summon mythical beings, and help people avoid the need to conduct any business with Jews. On July 17, 2020, Davis used his Facebook account to say that: (a) the Jewish Rothschild family had been instrumental in getting “every president elected in every country in the Western Hemisphere”; and (b) the Rothschilds and their fellow “global elite” had unleashed the deadly coronavirus pandemic upon the world in an effort to kill billions of people.
Shortly after the murderous October 7, 2023 attacks in which Hamas terrorists snuffed out the lives of more than 1,200 Israelis, Bush called for “an immediate ceasefire” on the premise that: (a) “violations of human rights do not justify more violations of human rights,” and (b) “a military response will only exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis alike.” “As part of achieving a just and lasting peace,” she added, “we must do our part to stop this violence and trauma by ending US government support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid.”
Later that same month, Bush, demanding that Israel terminate its retributive military assault against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, called for “humanitarian assistance to urgently be delivered to the 2.2 million people under siege and trapped in Gaza,” adding: “We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom.”
On January 31, 2024, Bush and fellow Squad member Rashida Tlaib were the only two U.S. House members to vote against The No Immigration Benefits for Hamas Terrorists Act, which passed in the House by a count of 422-2. Aiming to build upon an already-existing statute that barred members of designated terror groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from entering the United States for any reason, the bill advocated extending the ban to members of the Palestine Liberation Organization as well as anyone who had “carried out, participated in, planned, financed, afforded material support to, or otherwise facilitated any of the attacks against Israel initiated by Hamas beginning on October 7, 2023.” “I opposed [the legislation] because it is a redundant, empty messaging bill Republicans are using to target immigrants and incite anti-Palestinian hate,” Bush said in a social media post. “Republicans have ZERO credibility on these issues.”
In a May 15, 2024 op-ed for Teen Vogue magazine, Bush applauded students across the United States who had participated in anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations protesting Israel’s alleged mistreatment of the Palestinian people and condemning America’s support for the Jewish state. Some excerpts:
“From Columbia University in New York City to Washington University in St. Louis to The George Washington University in Washington, DC, thousands of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and their allies of different faiths, ethnicities, and backgrounds have engaged in overwhelmingly nonviolent civil disobedience in support of Palestinian human rights and an end to their universities’ complicity in violation of those rights….
“We have all seen the footage of armed officers using pepper spray, rubber bullets, fists, and boots against students, faculty, and their allies without provocation. We have all witnessed the cowardly response from too many university administrators, some of whom would rather risk or inflict violence on their own community members than grapple with calls for divestment [from Israel]. We have all heard the stories of students arrested, assaulted, suspended, evicted, banned, smeared, humiliated….
“Protesters are now being smeared as violent and antisemitic. Let me be clear: Trespassing, setting up tents, and carrying signs are not violent. Condemning a government that has killed more than 14,5000 [sic] in seven months and created a humanitarian catastrophe is not antisemitic….
“None of what protesters … at Columbia University have experienced is new — it’s happened hundreds of times throughout our history. It happened in Boston in 1770, when protesters supported independence from British rule. It happened in Pennsylvania in 1897, when mine workers demanded labor rights. It happened in Virginia in 1917, when protesters demanded equal rights for women. It happened in Selma in 1965, when protesters demanded civil rights for Black people. It happened in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere in 1968, when protesters demanded an end to the Vietnam War. And it happened in Washington, DC, and in communities all across our country in 2020, when protesters demanded an end to police brutality.
“Behind every attempt to silence a protester is an idea that those in power don’t want people to hear, yet protest movements have been remarkably successful throughout our history. The women’s suffrage movement led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment despite opposition from those in power. The same is true of the Civil Rights movement, which culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the youth-led nationwide protests that led to the end of the Vietnam War, and South African apartheid….
“We are indeed in a battle for the soul of the nation. These students represent the best of that soul. I stand with them.”
Summer Lee was born in November 1987 and grew up in North Braddock, Pennsylvania. After earning a B.A. in journalism from Pennsylvania State University in 2009 and a J.D. from the Howard University School of Law in 2015, she returned to her home community and became an activist, focusing on such issues as racial profiling and the minimum wage. In 2022, Lee was elected to represent Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Lee’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
When the Jewish state launched a military campaign in response to a massive wave of deadly rockets that Hamas terrorists in Gaza were firing indiscriminately into Israel in May 2021, Lee tweeted: “When I hear American pols use the refrain ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ in response to undeniable atrocities on a marginalized pop, I can’t help but think of how the west has always justified indiscriminate & disproportionate force & power on weakened & marginalized ppl.” She also tweeted: “The US has nvr shown leadership in safeguarding human rights of folks its othered But as we fight against injustice here in the mvmnt for Blk lives, we must stand against injustice everywhere. Inhumanities against the Palestinian ppl cannot be tolerated or justified.”
In April 2022, Lee appeared at a Pittsburgh Jewish Federation event where she characterized the Iran nuclear deal as a vital component of “the diplomatic approach” to enhancing “the safety and security of that region.” She also accused Israel of committing “undeniable atrocities on a marginalized population”; declined to dismiss the notion that Israel was a nation that practiced apartheid; and advocated in favor of placing explicit conditions on U.S. aid to Israel. “[W]e have to insure,” she said, “that we protect against illegal annexation of Palestinia[n] lands, demolition of Palestinian homes, expansions into settlements. It means we have to insure against the detention of children. I think that those are all very reasonable things that we should be holding our partners, our allies [like Israel], accountable to.”
Shortly after the infamous October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, Lee condemned “Hamas’ horrifying attack on children and civilians” while simultaneously calling for “an end to the occupation” and a “deescalation and end to this tragic cycle of violence.” She also posted a series of tweets expressing sympathy for the Palestinians of Gaza and denouncing Israel’s “human rights violations.” Moreover, Lee’s office released a prepared statement that read as follows:
“The violence that continues to escalate in Israel and Palestine is devastating to watch. I once again strongly condemn the violence, terrorism, and hostage taking by Hamas that tore away the lives of over a thousand Israeli civilians. But we cannot allow innocent civilians in Gaza — including children — to continue to be collectively and inhumanely punished for Hamas’ horrific actions, as we’ve already seen Israeli airstrikes kill thousands of civilians against international human rights law, and force hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. Continued retaliation against civilians will do nothing to end this tragic cycle of violence.”
On October 17, 2023, Lee used her X account to help disseminate an erroneous Al Jazeera English news report claiming that the Israeli military had just killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an air strike against the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in the Gaza Strip. While the congresswoman solemnly declared that there was absolutely “no moral ambiguity” about the “reprehensible” nature of the Israeli action, a trove of video, audio, and radar evidence soon began to emerge showing that: (a) the air strike in question had actually resulted from a misfired rocket launched by the Gaza-based terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and (b) the actual death toll was in the neighborhood of 50, rather than the multiple hundreds claimed in the initial news stories. As the Washington Examiner reported on October 18:
“Despite many of her followers pleading with her to double-check the story and even responding that she would do so, Lee left the [X] post up for nearly 20 hours, claiming Israelis were responsible for the strike, even after evidence began to emerge that it was Islamic Jihad who had misfired and not Israel.
“Evidence also shows that the hit was in the parking lot, not the hospital itself, making the initial posting one of the more significant media mistakes in modern history.
“Her reckless decision was a damning move and took nearly a day for her to walk back, saying in another post that ‘we all have a responsibility to work to share factual information and have the humility to correct when we learn more,’ yet still failing to remove the original misleading post.”
In her 2024 re-election campaign, Lee accepted four donations from leaders of two Hamas-linked entities: American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). One of those donors was Zahra Billoo, the head of CAIR’s office in the San Francisco Bay Area, who in 2021 gave a speech warning about the deceptions of “polite Zionists.” Another CAIR-aligned donor to Lee was the organization’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, who in November 2023 said the following about the October 7th Hamas attacks: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on October 7. Yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their own land that they were not allowed to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”
In March 2024, Jewish Insider reported that ever since the Hamas atrocities of October 7th, the then-popular Instagram page “Dear White Staffers” (DWS), which was operated by an employee in Summer Lee’s congressional office, had morphed “into a prominent and vocal anti-Israel platform that some fellow Hill staffers describe as borderline or openly antisemitic.” In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, for instance, DWS had shared a post that featured a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine vintage poster from 1973 bearing a caption that read, in part: “The resistance continues.” Also after October 7th, DWS had not only accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, but also had condemned the U.S. government for continuing to “fun[d] and facilitate[e] genocides” by providing aid to Israel.
In March 2024 as well, more than 40 rabbis and cantors in the Pittsburgh area signed on to an open letter expressing their unhappiness with Lee’s repeated criticism of Israel’s military campaign against Hamas targets in Gaza. The letter read, in part:
“Last fall, we wrote to you with concerns about your rhetoric and votes in relation to the events of October 7 in Israel, the subsequent war, and the rise in antisemitism in America. You graciously agreed to meet with us, and in that meeting, you promised us that you would call out antisemitism and temper your own language. Sadly, three months later, you have not followed through on those commitments.
“Since that meeting, you have continued to use divisive rhetoric, which, at times, we have perceived as openly antisemitic. You have continued to oppose measures before the House of Representatives that condemned antisemitism, and you have continued to call for an unconditional cease-fire from one side of the conflict, a position that devalues the lives and beliefs of one group.
“Furthermore, you have accepted campaign contributions from people who have voiced virulently antisemitic sentiments, and while you eventually withdrew from speaking at the CAIR conference, you have … so far been unwilling to denounce the hatred and ugly language coming from the keynote speakers of that conference and the leadership of CAIR.”
During an April 28, 2024 appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Lee spoke out in support of the student protesters who, in recent weeks, had been demonstrating against Israel’s ongoing military response to the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, 2023. Among her remarks were the following: “I think that the number one goal for them [the students] right now … is that they want to see a ceasefire in Gaza, they want to see the indiscriminate bombings and killings … [T]hat is the central thing they are fighting for and they believe and they feel like our government can do more….”
Interviewer Margaret Brennan then said, “The Prime Minister of Israel said that what’s happening on America’s college campuses is horrific. He said the protesters are antisemitic mobs, and he compared it to what’s happening in German universities back in the 1930s. How do you respond to that or the perception of that, perhaps among some of your constituents?” Lee replied:
“Certainly, you know, his language is intentional and it’s always been. But the one thing that I know is that Benjamin Netanyahu has not been on the college campus in the United States. He has not talked to these students. He has not seen their encampments, he has not seen or heard the message that they’re delivering and he doesn’t want to hear it, right?… I’m not shocked that he would want to cast them as evil, cast them as in the wrong. That’s been his M.O.”
Gregorio Casar was born to affluent parents in Houston, Texas on May 4, 1989. In 2011 he earned a B.A. degree in political science and social thought from the University of Virginia (UV), where he was a campus organizer with Students & Workers United for a Living Wage. After graduating from UV, Casar was employed as a policy director for the Workers Defense Project, a self-described “member-based organization fighting for better working conditions for low-wage, immigrant workers in Texas.” He then served in the Austin city council from 2015 until 2022, at which time he was elected to represent Texas’ 35th Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Casar’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
In a December 2021 interview, Casar stated that his own views on Israel aligned with those of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has articulated the key elements of his perspective as follows:
“I believe that the [Israeli] occupation needs to end as soon as possible and of course should have ended a long time ago,” Casar said in the aforementioned interview of December 2021, “and I stand in solidarity with those [Palestinian] people who have had their rights trampled upon and want to see liberation of all folks there, and for people to have self-determination and autonomy.” “U.S. aid should not go toward doing things that are illegal or wrong,” he added.
In a January 9, 2022 letter to an Austin, Texas rabbi named Alan Freedman, Casar drew a moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians. While expressing his support for American military assistance to the Jewish state and his opposition to BDS, the congressman added: “I also believe in the right of the Palestinian people to live in peace, security, and democracy” by way of a “two state solution.” “To achieve such a solution,” he explained, “we cannot ignore the economic and power imbalance faced by the poorest Palestinians. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza and indefinite occupation in the West Bank are untenable for Israelis, Palestinians, and our collective conscience.” The “plight” and “suffering” of Palestinians, Casar elaborated, was rooted in the “poverty and injustice” to which Israel had long been subjecting them.
On October 13, 2023 – just six days after Hamas militants had murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks – Casar again demonstrated his devotion to the doctrine of moral equivalence when he wrote on Facebook: “Hamas must be stopped, Israeli and American hostages must be returned, AND Palestinians must be protected. Mass death of civilians in Gaza is unacceptable. We must urge Israel and all nations to protect innocent life. We cannot respond to Hamas’ war crimes with war crimes.”
In the weeks and months that followed, Casar continued to denounce Israel’s military efforts to degrade and destroy Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some examples:
On April 20, 2024, Casar voted against H.R. 8034, the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, which earmarked U.S. funds for a variety of Israeli missile-defense systems such as the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and the Iron Beam. Casar and fellow Squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were among 19 Democrats who released a statement asserting that the expenditures advocated by the bill “could result in more killings of civilians in Rafah [Hamas’ last remaining stronghold in Gaza] and elsewhere,” and claiming that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared willing to “expand this conflict” while “inflicting extraordinary suffering on the people of Gaza” – simply in order “to preserve his power.”
Also in April 2024, Casar, according to a report in the Hawaii Tribune Herald, “went to the University of Texas to show solidarity with [student] demonstrators” who were protesting Israel’s continuing military initiatives against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and he “link[ed] their activism to that of students who [had] opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars” in decades past.
Delia Ramirez was born in Chicago in June 1983, to immigrant parents who hailed from Guatemala. After earning a B.A. degree in justice studies from Northeastern Illinois University, she worked for, and held leadership roles in, various social service agencies, nonprofit advocacy organizations, and local community groups. Ramirez subsequently served as a member of the Illinois legislature from December 2018 to January 2023, and in November 2022 she was elected to represent the state’s heavily Democratic 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House.
Ramirez’s Track Record Regarding Israel & the Jews
On October 16, 2023 – while Israel was engaged in a military campaign targeting the Gaza-based Hamas organization whose operatives had recently murdered more than 1,200 Israelis in a series of coordinated terrorist attacks — Ramirez suggested that the Jewish state was guilty of subjecting the Palestinians to “dehumanization, scapegoating, and collective punishment.”
Nine days later, Ramirez said: “We cannot unequivocally support or condone the Israeli government’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The Palestinian people are not Hamas. We must use our collective voice and influence to end the siege that has claimed the lives of more than 2,000 Palestinian children, displaced thousands of Palestinians, and limited the humanitarian aid that can reach the region. Violence cannot bring peace, and atrocities cannot justify further war crimes.” Notwithstanding the distinction that Ramirez took pains to draw between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists, Hamas was – and remains to this day – extremely popular among those civilians.
In an October 30, 2023 interview with host Amy Goodman of the leftwing radio, television, and Internet news program Democracy Now!, Ramirez, calling for “deescalation and ceasefire” as a way of ensuring “the safety of innocent civilians” in Gaza, said: “The reality is that if we care about Israelis, if we care about the Jewish community and their safety, we have to understand that it’s interconnected with the safety and the freedom of Palestinians.” “Bombs are going to kill people,” she added. “And in this case, it is killing thousands of [Palestinian] civilians. We’ve seen it already in the last three weeks. We have to do everything we can to ensure that we’re honoring international law, that the money we’re sending [to Israel] isn’t killing [Palestinian] children …”
On January 27, 2024, Ramirez praised the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations’ highest court, for instructing Israel to prevent, to the best of its ability, mass death and calamity in Gaza, and to ensure that humanitarian aid reached its intended beneficiaries in Gaza. “While the [ICJ] ruling calls [on] Israel to do all in its power to limit and prevent death, destruction, and any acts of genocide in Gaza,” said Ramirez in a statement, “the U.S. must also confront our complicity in the International Court of Justice’s determination. Yesterday’s ruling affirms we must continue challenging our nation’s unconditional support for the Netanyahu administration. Ceasefire NOW.”
In April 2024, Ramirez voted against a $95 billion international aid package that earmarked 26.38 billion American dollars for Israel. The measure passed in the U.S. House by a margin of 366-58, with 21 Republicans and 37 Democrats voting “No.” “When it comes to unconditional aid to the extremist, warmonger Netanyahu,” Ramirez said in a statement, “the truth is that one more dollar to him would serve to bomb children, divide us further and dismantle any chance at long-lasting peace.”
On May 8, 2024, Ramirez went to the floor of the U.S. House and condemned Israel emphatically. Citing fraudulent, highly inflated statistics furnished by the Hamas Ministry of Health, she said, in part:
“I rise today to affirm that we’re paying attention. We were paying attention when 35,000 Palestinians were killed. We were paying attention when over 14,500 children were robbed of their future, 404 doctors and aid workers were killed, 100 journalists and media workers were killed. And we are paying attention as over 1.1 million people [are] on the verge of starving to death. Yesterday we were paying attention when Israel began its invasion into [the southern Gaza city of] Rafah…. We were paying attention last month when a nonpartisan task force issued an independent credible report outlining the Israeli government’s violations of international humanitarian law. In 76 pages of details, they provide example after example of what they call a systematic disregard for international humanitarian law and military best practice regarding civilian harm mitigation by the Israel Defense Forces, including with U.S.-provided arms….
“We know that Netanyahu’s administration has been [sic] and is continuing to assure the U.S. government that it is using U.S. weapons in line with international laws and it’s not interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid. But given what we have witnessed over the last 214 days [since October 7, 2023], how can we trust Netanyahu’s official assurances that they are complying with international law? How can we be expected to ignore the violations of international law and interference with the delivery of humanitarian assistance we have witnessed in real time? What are we to say to the constituents whose families are starving? Whose loved ones cannot receive medical care? Or who never received the promised evacuation from Gaza. What do we say to the brave and courageous students across campuses, our children, who are defending other children in Gaza who are being murdered with U.S. bombs? What do we say to the children who are still looking for their mothers under the rubble as we approach Mother’s Day? The administration’s willingness to make exceptions for Israel has got to stop. The actions of the Netanyahu government are exceptional, exceptionally noncompliant with international law and exceptionally unconcerned with human rights.”
During their years together as legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives, members of The Squad have had frequent opportunities to collectively display their low regard for Israel and the Jewish people. Some notable examples include the following:
In early August of 2024, five students, two of whom were Jewish, filed a class action lawsuit against Squad members Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman — and also against at least a dozen anti-Israel organizing groups — on charges that all the defendants had incited highly inflammatory and sometimes violent anti-Israel protests and encampment activities at Columbia University in April of that year. Due to the incendiary rhetoric and actions that those defendants had engaged in, the five plaintiffs were too frightened to make their own identities publicly known, thus they filed their suit anonymously. “The Gaza Encampment was extreme and outrageous conduct,” read the lawsuit. “It was illegal. It violated university rules. Its occupants harassed, followed, physically blocked, intimidated, and bullied Jewish students.” Moreover, the suit:
As noted in the opening section of this report, members of The Squad have, on many occasions:
With regard to the final item in the foregoing list, it should be noted that the leading organizers of the campus protest movement – which in numerous instances have been marred by violence — have included such groups as: (a) Within Our Lifetime (WOL), which advocates for the permanent obliteration of Israel by affirming “the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in all of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” thereby dismantling “the entirety of the zionist settler-colonial project”; and (b) Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which likens Israel to both Nazi Germany and America’s Jim Crow-era South, while accusing the Jewish state of supporting the genocide of Palestinians.
The key funding sources behind the campus protests are also very much worth noting. As Politico reported on May 5, 2024, those sources “include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker.” For example:
The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reports that yet another major financial backer of the student protests has been the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, which has close ties to the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). “Samidoun plays a leading role in the PFLP’s anti-Israel propaganda efforts, fundraising and recruiting activists,” says JNS. “Several members of Samidoun are also members of the PFLP, including the chief coordinator of Samidoun, Khaled Barakat, and the organization’s international coordinator, Charlotte Kates.”
And perhaps most ominously, additional support for the anti-Israel protests on American college campuses has come from Israel’s mortal enemy, Iran. As U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines noted in a July 9, 2024 statement: “In recent weeks, Iranian government actors have sought to opportunistically take advantage of ongoing protests regarding the war in Gaza, using a playbook we’ve seen other actors use over the years. We have observed actors tied to Iran’s government posing as activists online, seeking to encourage protests, and even providing financial support to protesters.”
In short, The Squad has chosen to support a protest movement with clearly identifiable links to an array of entities that openly and proudly harbor a profound contempt for the Jewish state and its people.
Moreover, Squad members have routinely and repeatedly drawn a moral equivalence between the Islamic-supremacist Palestinian territory of Gaza, which refuses to permit even a single Jew to set foot within its borders, and the parliamentary democracy of Israel, where Arabs:
As the Jewish scholar, broadcaster, and bestselling author Dennis Prager has observed: “Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have.”
The Democrat legislators who constitute The Squad, however, are willfully blind to these plain and indisputable realities – chiefly because of the hatred that beats in their hearts for Israel and the Jewish people. Though they have reached lofty heights in the realm of American politics, they are utterly bereft of wisdom, discernment, and a moral compass.
Finally, it is vital to remember that The Squad is not merely some small, insignificant lunatic fringe of the Democratic Party. Rather, its very existence as a highly visible and widely publicized political caucus whose agendas align neatly with those of the influential socialist Bernie Sanders, is a reflection of the dramatic leftward shift that the party as a whole has undergone in recent years. And if, by chance, Democrats who are perceived to be part of the “establishment” wing of their party should happen to underperform in the upcoming elections, The Squad and its far-left allies, smelling the proverbial blood-in-the-water, will surely seek to discredit them as milquetoast mediocrities who lack the radical fervor necessary for their party’s revitalization. On July 11, 2024, Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro articulated the implications of such a turn-of-events as follows:
“At this point, I think the only people in the Democratic Party who are truly excited about Joe Biden’s [presidential] nomination are the immediate Biden family … and the far left of the Democratic Party. I think one of the reasons the far left is excited is because, number one, he [Biden] has governed very far to the left, but number two, if he fails and falls down on the job and Donald Trump wins, guess which wing of the party is ascendant. Joe Biden is widely perceived inside the Democratic party as a moderate, but that is not actually what he is. If he fails against Donald Trump, the heir apparent will be … Bernie Sanders and AOC.”
Biden, of course, has since decided to withdraw from the presidential race and “pass the torch” to Kamala Harris, who is likewise being falsely depicted as a “moderate” by her party and the American media. But in reality, Harris is a longtime proven radical who in 2019 – shortly before Biden named her as his vice presidential running mate – was rated as America’s “most liberal” / “most politically left” senator by GovTrack.us, a nonpartisan tracker of Congress and its members. Indeed, Harris’ politics were even farther to the left than those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Whether she succeeds or fails in her bid for the White House this November, Harris will aggressively and enthusiastically help The Squad advance its agendas and gain an increased level of prominence on the American political landscape.
* This report was authored by John Perazzo and was posted in August 2024.