Jamal El-Haj is a Social Democratic member of Parliament for Malmö, Sweden’s third-biggest city. In 2018, he called Israel an “apartheid state.” Rather than censure him, Magdalena Andersson, the Social Democratic prime minister, appointed El-Haj to the foreign affairs committee. Before we laugh too hard at the wacky Scandi socialists, remember that House Democrats did much the same with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in January 2023.
In May, as the Republicans were preparing to expel Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Sweden’s Social Democrats suspended Jamal El-Haj from Parliament for taking part in the “Palestinians in Europe” conference at Malmö. The conference organizer, a Dutch Palestinian named Amin Abu Rashid, has such damningly close links with Hamas that members of Sweden’s Green and Left parties dropped out of the conference.
MIKE GALLAGHER ARGUES IT'S TIME TO BAN TIKTOK AS APP IGNITES SYMPATHY FOR OSAMA BIN LADEN
In November 2010, Ronen Bergman reported that Israeli intelligence regarded Abu Rashid as “the chief Hamas fundraiser in western Europe,” specializing in smuggling cash to Gaza. In June, Dutch police arrested and charged Abu Rashid and a second man with sending 5.5 million euros (just under $6 million) to groups allied with Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organization. The Dutch public prosecutor called Abu Rashid a “sponsor of terrorism.”
Jamal El-Haj is still on Sweden’s foreign affairs committee. Magdalena Andersson, now in opposition, is standing by her man. El-Haj, she asserted in a televised debate on Oct. 8, has “devoted his political life to fighting Hamas,” his “biggest political enemy.” An investigation by the Bulletin website found no evidence to support this, beyond El-Haj signing a motion after the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.
The motion called Hamas a “terrorist movement born out of extreme circumstances and whose goal we do not share.” This apologia for mass murderers should not be confused with the statesmanlike equivocations of Barack Obama: “What Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable.”
“There is a romanticizing of terrorism in certain circles of S. [the Social Democrats], which should bother S.’s leader,” Sweden’s conservative prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, said in the Stockholm Parliament on Nov. 15.
“Are you accusing Jamal Hamas of romanticizing terrorism?” Andersson replied incredulously. She started to sob, as romantics do. By calling El-Haj “Jamal Hamas,” she had said the quiet part out loud.
Again, before we laugh at the clueless Swedes, look at the terror romance in Britain. Muhammad Sawalha allegedly ran Hamas’s operations in the West Bank in the 1990s. To evade arrest by Israel, he fled to Britain on a relative’s passport, received political asylum and, in the early 2000s, a British passport. In 2021, two years after Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs named Sawalha as Hamas’s U.K. representative “in charge of foreign relations,” he received a subsidy on a government-sponsored mortgage.
A Labour government let him in and gave him British citizenship. A Conservative government gave him a mortgage with taxpayers’ money. The rot is endemic.
On Nov. 13, Rishi Sunak, a Conservative prime minister, fired his home secretary, Suella Braverman, for stating the truth that weekly pro-Palestinian marches through central London are “hate marches,” festivals of anti-Jewish incitement. The next day, the ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed by Piers Morgan. Corbyn refused 15 times to call Hamas, a group he previously called his “friends” and seekers of “peace and social justice,” for what they are: a “terror group.”
And before we laugh at the decadent Brits, remember that in late October, Canary Mission reported that Rep. Rashida Tlaib (R-MI) “employed no less than three Hamas-linked activists to fundraise for her 2018 campaign.” One of that trio, Huwaida Arraf, was a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement, the coalition behind the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which attempted multiple breaches of Israel’s blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza between 2008 and 2011. Arraf was aboard the 2008 flotilla and 2010 flotilla; the latter ended in the killing of nine flotilla members when the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara was raided by Israeli commandos. Abu Rashid was also on the 2010 flotilla.
Israeli intelligence believed he had raised funds for the flotilla and trained participants for the fight he sought. The Israelis also noted the presence in the flotilla of “a Syrian intelligence officer serving as the liaison officer for Iranian intelligence in the Balkans.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Jamal El-Haj knows Abu Rashid, who raised funds for Hamas and the Gaza flotillas. Abu Rashid sailed on a flotilla with Huwaida Arraf, who raised money for Rashida Tlaib and who, like Tlaib, slanders Israel with “genocide” and campaigns for the destruction of the Jewish state. What a small world it is. How quickly the doublespeak of Palestinian rights leads to the romance with terror. How extensive the “activist” network is. How effectively it spreads lies on social media about Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide” and “massacres” — the kind of lies for which the House voted to censure Tlaib on Nov. 7.
Twenty Democrats had the integrity to vote in favor of censuring Tlaib. As for the rest, like Obama said, “You have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”