Vice President Kamala Harris recently appointed an Arab-American outreach director who once accused “Zionists” of “controlling a lot” of American politics, The Washington Free Beacon reported on Thursday.
The Harris campaign last week tapped Brenda Abdelall, the Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary of partnership and engagement, to oversee efforts to win support among Arab-American voters.
“The Zionists have a strong voice in American politics. ... I would say they’re controlling a lot of it,” Abdelall told The New York Sun in 2002, while attending the American Muslim Council’s annual convention in Washington, the Beacon revealed.
She suggested that the election defeat of former congressman Earl Hilliard Sr. (D-Ala.) “shows the Jewish influence in politics,” according to the Sun.
The Sun also interviewed Abdelall’s mother, Mona, who founded the American Muslim Council’s Ann Arbor, Mich., branch. She agreed with her daughter regarding “Zionist” influence.
“Just listen to President [George W.] Bush’s speech” on the Middle East this week, she said. “He’s just blindly supporting [then-Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon.”
The Harris campaign defended Abdelall, telling Fox News Digital on Friday, “Those 2002 comments do not reflect Brenda’s views or the views of the campaign.
“In her role at DHS, Brenda worked closely on the implementation of the country’s first National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. She also led efforts for the first United We Stand summit, a White House event to counter hate-fueled violence, like we tragically saw with the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue [in Pittsburgh],” the campaign said.
Abdelall joins other controversial members of Harris’s team, such as Nasrina Bargzie, who will also lead outreach to Muslim and Arab voters.
Mort Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that Bargzie sought “to shut down investigations of the groups that harass and attack Jewish students.”
Other Harris campaign advisers are known for pressuring Israel and urging closer U.S. relations with Iran.
Phil Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, is the subject of a congressional probe by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) over his ties to a member of an Iranian government influence network, the Free Beacon reported.
Ilan Goldenberg, Harris’s liaison to the Jewish community, also supports closer ties to Iran. In a J Street-organized briefing, he said the U.S. must “publicly criticize the Israelis” to pressure them to accept a Gaza ceasefire.
Harris also appointed the Rev. Jen Butler to conduct outreach to the faith community. Dubbed antisemitic by the group StopAntisemitism, Butler has worked with antisemitic activist Linda Sarsour.
Harris is seeking to regain the support of Arab and Muslim voters and progressive activists for whom the Gaza war has become a key issue, and who are angered by Biden administration policy.
More than 100,000 voters in the battleground state of Michigan, home to a large concentration of Arab-Americans, voted “uncommitted” during the Democratic primary to protest President Joe Biden’s continued support of Israel.
Harris herself has made moves to distance herself from Israel.
Although it is customary for vice presidents to preside over speeches by foreign leaders in the U.S. Senate, Harris chose not to attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the joint session of Congress in July.
In July, she defended anti-Israel campus protesters, telling The Nation magazine that they’re “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
In March, at a civil rights commemoration in Alabama, Harris devoted the opening of her speech to calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
And Harris reportedly was behind the effort to insert a line about “Islamophobia” into a Biden speech supporting Israel shortly after the Oct. 7 attack.
