Lately, 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been staking out a position as a defender of the American Muslim community against the alleged white nationalism of Donald Trump. Along with fellow candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Warren was outspoken in support of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) when President Trump attacked Omar earlier this year. Warren has also vocally opposed the so-called “Muslim Ban,” a major priority for Muslim activist groups.
Unfortunately, in the process, Warren has become close to several organizations that promote political Islamism — an imperialist ideology demanding that Muslims seek political supremacy as a religious imperative. Some of these organizations are connected to actual terror organizations or are otherwise supportive of them.
For example, in December 2016, Sen. Warren was a featured speaker at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center (ISBCC) — the infamous “Roxbury Mosque” — at the urging of one of her staffers who attended the mosque. This mosque has deep connections to terrorism: The Islamic Society of Boston was founded by convicted terror financier Abdurahman Alamoudi, the Roxbury Mosque itself had Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a trustee, and several attendees later joined al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Furthermore, at the time ISBCC was under the direct control of the Boston chapter of the Muslim-American Society (MAS), the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
In her drive to oppose Trump and support an embattled minority, Sen. Warren is actually lending her credibility to radical groups that do not reflect the American Muslim mainstream. This could simply reflect a commitment by Warren to civil rights and equal treatment for all Americans, coupled with a lack of care over with whom she ought to associate.
But it could also be part of a disturbing new trend, in which a former supporter of Israel is ostentatiously embracing political Islamism to slyly court the increasingly anti-Semitic radical wing of the progressive movement. By supporting Islamists, Sen. Warren might be signaling that she’s now on board with the hard-left argument of “intersectionality” — that all so-called “marginalized” groups need to be uncritically supported against their supposed oppressors, including the United States itself.
The warning signs have been piling up. Starting with President Trump’s election in 2016, Warren also began associating with Islamist groups in order to criticize Trump’s “Muslim ban.” In January 2017, Warren was one of the featured speakers at a protest against the misnamed “Muslim ban” held by the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization presenting itself as a civil rights champion of Muslims that actually was founded by the covert Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood. The FBI severed ties with CAIR in 2009, after evidence of its close ties to the terror organization Hamas was presented during the infamous Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial.
CAIR also works constantly to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaign against Israel. BDS was initially funded and propelled in the United States by the Islamist group American Muslims for Palestine, a front group for Hamas, and it has the professed aim of destroying Israel entirely and ethnically cleansing its Jews from the region.
In June 2018, Warren participated in the “Women Disobey” march against the family separation policies carried out at the Mexican border. One of the main organizers was Linda Sarsour, a noted Islamist radical who is the executive director of MPower Change — a group that regularly claims the United States is corrupted by white supremacy and even calls for the abolition of ICE and the entire prison system alike!
Unsurprisingly, observers have noted a recent shift in Warren’s tone towards Israel — from her previous support to sharp criticism. As late as 2014, Warren stated that “America has a very special relationship with Israel” and defended increased military funding; but more recently, Warren attacked Trump’s move of the American embassy to Jerusalem, condemned new “settlement” activity, and called for expanded U.S. aid to Gaza. Some former supporters grew concerned that Warren was no longer “doing her homework” and was trying to position herself for the 2020 presidential campaign at Israel’s expense.
Then in March 2019, Warren refused to attend the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC’s national conference and gave no explanation, despite having attended in the past. This followed a joint pressure campaign by MoveOn.org and Sarsour’s organization MPower Change.
After the massacre of Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, Warren stated that “in the same way that [Islamic State] and al-Qaeda terrorism pose a threat to the United States, so does the rise of white nationalism.” The comparison is overheated; while white supremacist terrorism is more dangerous now than in recent years and needs to be dealt with, modern white supremacists have never marshaled standing armies with thousands of personnel, nor have they managed to control territory or form their own state as did Islamic State.
So why compare the two? Here, Warren was echoing a line pushed in unison by hard-left activist groups and Islamist organizations such as CAIR and Emgage; CAIR-Oklahoma director Adam Soltani went so far as to say that “white supremacy is the root of Islamophobia,” and Emgage has made white supremacy a recurring theme in its messaging.
In June, the Warren campaign hired a new Director for Progressive Partnerships, an activist named Max Berger. Berger has a long history of incendiary claims against Israel and claims in support of domestic Islamists like Omar Suleiman — claims which were so virulent that Berger recently cleared his entire Twitter history to conceal them.
Finally, on June 24th, Warren was one of only two presidential candidates (the other being third-tier candidate Jay Inslee) to address the Muslim Collective for Equitable Democracy 2019, a conference of Islamist politicians, candidates, and activists that featured some of the most harmful Islamist voices in the United States, such as CAIR founder Nihad Awad.
Supporting the American Muslim community against the Trump administration has become sound progressive politics. But associating herself with Islamists like CAIR and Linda Sarsour indicates that Warren may be going far beyond simple political gestures — she is now actually internalizing the Islamist narrative. That is a mistake. The goal of the Islamist movement is nothing less than the delegitimization of the American constitutional order and the seizure of political power. The American Muslim community is incredibly diverse and has more voices than just the Islamists; if Warren wants to support the Muslim community, associating with the Islamists is the last thing she should do.
Dr. Oren Litwin is the associate director of Islamism in Politics, a project of the Middle East Forum.