Maryland’s attorney general fights hate with hate

FBI Director Christopher Wray recently told a Senate committee that anti-Semitism is reaching “historic levels,” to the point that 60% of all religion-based hate crimes are directed at Jews. Jews compose only 2.4% of the American population. So naturally, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown appointed a member of the most prominent Muslim Brotherhood organization responsible for fueling such hate to a hate crimes commission.

Welcome to Blue America.

Earlier this year, Brown named Zainab Chaudry of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to the newly formed Maryland Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. Chaudry is the Maryland director of CAIR, an organization whose national leader just praised the October 7 massacre of Jews in Israel.

“I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,” Nihad Awad said of the atrocities at the annual gathering of American Muslims for Palestine.

Awad’s comments were not surprising. He has been an ally of Hamas since CAIR’s early days in the 1990s. As radical as Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization had become by then, the PLO did not go nearly far enough in Awad’s estimation.

Awad described the evolution of his thinking during a talk at Barry University on March 22, 1994. “I used to support the PLO, and I used to be the president of the General Union of Palestine Students, which is part of the PLO here in the United States,” he said. “But after I researched the situation inside Palestine and outside, I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO.”

So it’s hardly shocking that Awad would be enraptured by Hamas’ murder of 1,400 Jews far more than the “low-scale” body count of past PLO terrorist attacks, which were usually counted in singles or dozens. Awad is all for big-league jihad.

Founded to ‘protest the crimes of the Jews’

CAIR is not just a garden-variety anti-Israel left-wing group that believes Israel doesn’t have the right to exist. It has ties to Hamas. Awad cofounded the organization in June 1994 with Omar Ahmad and Rafiq Jaber. All three men were leading members of the Islamic Association for Palestine.

During the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror funding trial, IAP was portrayed in documents recovered by the FBI as an organization of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. One document described the IAP as a fundraiser for the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Hamas is the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, which means “Islamic Resistance Movement.”

That same document also lays out the IAP’s core missions, which include “contacting embassies and international organizations to protest the crimes of the Jews in Palestine.” In other words, CAIR’s founders are in the business of spreading the sorts of blood libels that have led to a surge in hate crimes against Jews.

This is why the Justice Department in 2008 summed up CAIR’s history by observing that “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”

A Texas federal judge observed in 2009 that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, [Islamic Society of North America], and [North American Islamic Trust] with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.”

In short, CAIR’s founders and its current chairman are, at the very least, Hamas-adjacent if not Hamas proper.

Peddling ignorance and hate

Which brings us back to Zainab Chaudry’s appointment to the Maryland hate crimes panel. Whereas her boss Awad praised the massacre, Chaudry denied it took place.

“I will never be able to understand how the world summoned up rage for 40 fake Israeli babies while completely turning a blind eye to 3,000 real Palestinian babies,” Chaudry wrote in a Facebook post dated October 26.

Her Facebook posts are replete with all sorts of conspiracy theories denying the attacks and denying Israel’s right to exist while praising the martyrs of Hamas and invoking Islamic prophecies about taking over Israel. She is also spreading the very blood libels against Israel that are singularly responsible for the surge in attacks on Jews around the world.

Here is one gem from Chaudry’s Facebook page just 10 days after the massacre:

There is nothing wrong with Chaudry exercising her First Amendment rights to spew hate and ignorance. The problem is when state governments elevate the most radical Islamic voices to the commissions combatting the hate that flows effortlessly from their mouths. Imagine a governor or attorney general in the 1920s appointing a member of the Ku Klux Klan to a hate crimes commission on the heels of surging anti-black lynchings.

What is even more shocking is that Maryland House Bill 1066, which Governor Wes Moore (D) signed in June, literally requires that a member of CAIR be among the two dozen participants in the commission. Hamas is not relegated to the tunnels of Gaza. It walks freely in the halls of our government.

Meanwhile, local activists have circulated a petition calling for a change in the commission’s composition and Chaudry’s immediate removal. After receiving blowback from Chaudry’s social media posts, Brown suspended her for two weeks but then reinstated her to the position as a fox guarding the henhouse. Chaudry never once apologized for her pro-Hamas posts and continues to peddle pro-jihadist propaganda.

Then again, one would expect no less from someone who is a member of an organization affiliated with Hamas. It’s Maryland’s Democratic government and its appalling support for Hamas fundraisers that should shock all of us.