Heading into November, Democrats potentially have a story that ought to be both feel-good and helpful in appealing to a small, but growing constituency. The Democratic Congressional candidate for Minnesota’s very blue Fifth District is on the verge of becoming the first-ever Muslim elected to Congress.
But embracing the candidate poses enormous risks. Keith Ellison has a disturbing history with the Nation of Islam and has received financial and other help from a self-identified supporter of Hamas.
Over the next two months, the Democrats will need to embrace or distance itself from Ellison. Democratic credentials on national security could be undermined if they fail to denounce a candidate closely allied with someone that a senior Democrat described as having “intimate connections to Hamas.”
Known for months has been that Ellison was involved in the 1990’s with the Nation of Islam, which even he now concedes is racist and anti-Semitic. In a letter of apology to the local Jewish community, Ellison claimed that he was never a member of the NOI and thus didn’t realize until later the organization's ugly ideology. But according to press accounts at the time, Ellison served as NOI spokesman at a 1997 public hearing where he defended—in his own words—“the truth” of a government official’s supposed comment that “Jews are the most racist white people.”
Only learned recently and far more troubling is Ellison’s seemingly tight connection with Nihad Awad, co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom he met almost two decades ago at the University of Minnesota.
Ellison’s campaign obviously has downplayed the affiliation with Awad. But here are the facts: Awad headlined a fundraiser last month that the campaign estimates netted $15,000 to $20,000, and in July, and it appears that CAIR's co-founder bundled contributions totaling just over $10,000. (The campaign issued a terse denial on the latter point, though it refused to explain away overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) The campaign has gone so far as to suggest that Awad did all this without having any contact with someone he’s known since the late 1980’s.
The Democrat’s supporters have taken a different tack. Rather than defend Awad or downplay his connections to the candidate, Ellison partisans have attempted to paint attacks on the candidate as overtly partisan or even bigoted. A Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist, for example, recently suggested that Ellison is under attack solely for being Muslim.