In the face of a claim from Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign that her vice presidential pick Tim Walz had no “personal relationship” with a Muslim imam who promoted a pro-Hitler film, new footage has been unearthed showing Walz praising the imam to his face at a public event as a “master teacher … over the time we’ve spent together.”
Walz was videotaped at an event hosted by Minnesota’s Muslim American Society on Feb. 16, 2018, as The Washington Examiner reported.
“I would like to first of all say thank you to imam,” Walz said to imam Asad Zaman, the Executive Director at Muslim American Society of Minnesota. “I am a teacher, so when I see a master teacher, I know it. Over the time we’ve spent together, one of the things I’ve had the privilege of is seeing the things in life through the eye of a master teacher, to try and get the understanding.”
“That brings me to the second lesson that imam taught me,” he continued. “I represent southern Minnesota in the United States Congress, and I’m not telling you anything new here, but Congress is a very broken place right now. It is a place that feeds on fear more than hope, it’s a place that feeds on division more than unity; it’s a place that feeds on trying someone to be the other than to be my brother. And I understood that; and I spent a lifetime making sure that all were welcome.”
“It was a lesson when imam told me to go speak to people,” he said. ‘I have pushed back through my whole career on the demonization of Islam, on the demonization of immigrants. … In this space, Imam Zaman is right on this, there is Islamophobia, there is a hatred that is being stirred.”
Walz has hosted Zaman at least five times, the Examiner noted. Those included May 2023 at Walz’s gubernatorial office; a May 2020 event; in April 2019, when the imam gave the invocation before Walz’s state address, and a May 2019 event that Walz hosted for Ramadan.
On October 7, as Hamas brutally massacred over 1200 Israelis, Zaman said he “stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks.”
“Zaman, meanwhile, has used his Facebook page over the years to share official Hamas press releases, blog posts on anti-Semitic websites slamming Jews, and, in one 2015 instance, a link to a piece on a website for a pro-Hitler film called The Greatest Story Never Told,” the Examiner pointed out.
