UPDATE: Check out our new post on the topic, "Mary Jo Kilroy locks up the Ohio 15th female HAMAS vote".
It hardly seems like a year since Mary Jo Kilroy and her employees were helping Kilroy comrade and Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) national vice chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras stonewall and cover-up the illegal appointment of Al-Akhras business partner Abukar Arman by the Franklin County Board of Commissioners (of which Kilroy is president) to the Franklin County Criminal Justice Planning Board, which oversees area homeland security. Kilroy claimed to have no involvement in Arman’s appointment (more on that later), which was illegal by virtue of the fact that he is not a US citizen and thereby barred from serving according to Ohio law. (Yes, they had a foreign national who had openly praised HAMAS helping overseeing our homeland security, but don’t worry — the Columbus Dispatch said it was all OK, because he wasn’t a terrorist!)
But in the weeks that followed the Arman county commission kerfuffle, Ahmad Al-Akhras saw fit to reward Mary Jo Kilroy’s never-ending congressional campaign for the Ohio 15th Congressional District with two donations totaling $750. By the end of 2007, Al-Akhras had fully doled out $1000 to Kilroy’s campaign — with the last contribution coming less than a month before Al-Akhras fled the country to take a job with the government of Dubai. FEC reports showing Al-Akhras’ 2007 contributions to Kilroy are below.
Mary Jo Kilroy accepted these donations AFTER CAIR — the very same organization that Al-Akhras heads — had been named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism finance trial. And as the Investigative Project has noted, CAIR has been identified as one of the key components of the HAMAS terrorist support infrastructure in the US. Not by me. By federal prosecutors.
In fact, around the time of Al-Akhras’ last contribution to Mary Jo Kilroy’s campaign, the Department of Justice identified CAIR as a longtime terrorist support operation in a legal brief filed in another terrorism-related case (for more see, “For the Record: Government Reminds Court of CAIR/MAS Ties to Terrorists”).
Here is what the DOJ said about Mary Jo Kilroy’s friends at CAIR:
Moreover, since its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists. (DOJ Brief No. 07-4778, USA v. Benkahla, Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, p. 58)
Oh, I just happen to have an image of that statement taken from the DOJ brief:
And it was more than a decade ago that Steve Pomerantz, former FBI chief of counterterrorism, made the very same assessment about CAIR’s ties to international terrorism:
Any objective assessment of the material presented above leads to the conclusion that CAIR, its leaders, and its activities, effectively give aid to international terrorist groups. Unfortunately, CAIR is but one of a new generation of new groups in the United States that hide under a veneer of “civil rights” or “academic” status but in fact are tethered to a platform that support terrorism. The degree to which these groups are able to deceive the American public and intimidate writers and counter-terrorist officials will be a significant ingredient in whether this country will be rendered more vulnerable to terrorism in future years. (“Counterterrorism in a Free Society,” The Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International 5:1, Spring 1998, p. 26)
And what, you may ask, is Abukar Arman up to these days now that he’s not helping oversee Franklin County homeland security? That’s right. He’s now the new president of CAIR-Columbus.
Exit question: Are HAMAS, CAIR, and Ahmad Al-Akhras the kinds of friends that Democratic congressional candidate Mary Jo Kilroy wants to be associated with?
