Aug. 16, 2024: Tim Walz, ‘America’s Dad,’ May Have Funded al-Qaeda

Palestinian militants at the border; Harris' housing subsidy; Adventures in neopronouns

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A note to readers: The Scroll will be in Chicago next week for the Democratic National Convention. We’ll be off Monday and reporting on the DNC throughout the rest of the week.

The Big Story

Tim Walz is supposed to be progressive America’s dad—the man who would “teach you how to change a tire or hang some shelves in your family room,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel. Specifically, he’s supposed to be a surrogate father figure for all the ultraprogressive young women who have apparently ended their relationships with their real fathers over political disagreements. Here’s a sample of headlines, all between Aug. 7 and 12:

• “Tim Walz Is the Perfect Antidote to the Brainwashed Fox News Dads,” The New Republic

• “For Some Women, Tim Walz Is the Dad That Fox News Stole From Them,” Jezebel

• “Young Liberal Voters Love Tim Walz. He’s a Reminder of the Dad They Lost to Partisan Division,” The UK Independent

• “Is Tim Walz ‘America’s Dad’? Women on TikTok See Father Figure in VP Pick,” Newsweek

Some of these articles claim to be reporting on an “organic” TikTok trend; however, at least three of them were published within 24 hours of Walz’s selection, which suggests the trend originated from the campaign. In April, the amateur porn star and TikTok influencer Farha Khalidi told Substack writer Richard Hanania that she was paid by Biden campaign operatives, working through third-party media conduits, to make TikTok videos saying that she felt “reflected” as a “person of color” by Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. So, we’re not saying the Walz dad content is an op—just that it might be. 

For those of us not looking to replace our fathers with vice presidential candidates, however, “Dad” has a problem: a remarkable number of connections to people who vocally support Islamic terrorism, including Hamas. We’ve reported on some of those connections before, such as the photo with National Students for Justice in Palestine founder Hatem Bazian at a meeting of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (a Muslim Brotherhood front); the meetings with, and funding of, an imam at a separate Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas front who shared pro-Hitler content on Facebook; and, following the denials that he had any relationship with said Hitler-curious imam, the release of video evidence of Walz praising the imam as a “master teacher” from whom he’d learned several “lessons,” among them not to contribute to “Islamophobia” by vetting refugees from countries with jihadism problems. 

On Friday, Gabe Kaminsky of the Washington Examiner, who broke the imam stories, dropped another bomb: Under Walz’s leadership, the state of Minnesota funneled $2 million to an Islamic nonprofit that fundraises for a charity linked to a U.S.-sanctioned al-Qaeda affiliate. The recipient of the state grants, the Islamic Association of North America (IANA), has, since Oct. 7, fundraised for a charity called Rahma Worldwide to send humanitarian aid to Gaza. One of Rahma’s collaborators in that effort, per a since-deleted Facebook post from the group’s president, is the Islamic Heritage Revival Society of Kuwait—which was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2008 for fundraising for al-Qaeda and was named in a January Washington Post article on “financial jihad” as one of the groups organizing online crowdfunding efforts for Hamas. 

Per Kaminsky:

Minnesota’s Health Department awarded over $238,600 to the IANA in 2024, according to state records. In 2023, the agency gave $191,900 to the IANA, which received over a million dollars from the agency in 2022 and over $612,200 from 2019 to 2021. The funding appears to have been for public health-related initiatives, including community vaccinations and outreach to the Somali community.

In other words, it’s unlikely that “Dad” is consciously laundering public money for the purposes of waging “financial jihad.” It’s just that in Minnesota Democratic politics, and increasingly in national Democratic policits, groups that are laundering money for financial jihad are part of the coalition, with all the access to public money—and protection from law enforcement scrutiny—that that membership entails. 

Read the report here. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: David Jager, the brother of one of Barack Obama’s long-term girlfriends, on the death of the multiracial future that could have been

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The Rest

→Kamala Harris continues to distance herself from Joe Biden by proposing even worse versions of some of Biden’s worst policy ideas. We reported yesterday that she planned to build on Biden’s interagency strike force to target corporate price gouging by proposing a federal ban on price gouging (with no details on how it would work or be enforced). On Friday, the Harris campaign unveiled a new plan: $25,000 in down payment assistance for 400,000 first-generation home buyers, plus a $10,000 tax credit for all first-time home buyers, building on Biden’s May proposal for $25,000 in down payment assistance for 400,000 first-generation home buyers. We suppose that, according to the Harris campaign’s logic, the unexplained federal price fixing scheme would somehow negate the inflationary impact of creating a $10 billion housing demand subsidy out of nothing. In the real world of non-Chavísta economics, however, we suspect it’s simply a recipe for more housing inflation. 

→Bureaucratic Priorities: A Play in Two Acts

Act I:

After taking office in 2021, Mr. Biden issued an executive order that sought to dial back his predecessor’s hard-line immigration agenda and “restore faith” in the legal immigration system. Among other steps, the order called for action to “substantially reduce current naturalization processing times” with the goal of strengthening integration of new Americans. …

The Biden administration began deploying new technology and additional staff in 2022 to reduce the pending caseload of citizenship applications… The Biden administration also shortened the naturalization application to 14 pages from 20. It raised the application fee in April to $710 from $640, but made it easier for low-income people to qualify for a discount.

That’s from a New York Times story earlier this week on the “surge in naturalization efficiency” under the Biden administration, in which one source praised the policy for “potentially reshaping the electorate, merely months before a pivotal election.”

Act II:

The point we want to highlight is that it took two months for federal authorities to figure out that the man they’d already released into the country was the leader of the “Los Killers” gang, who was wanted for—who could’ve guessed?—killing.

→There also seems to be a growing problem with would-be Palestinian terrorists attempting to cross the southern border. Earlier this week, the New York Post reported that Border Patrol agents had arrested a Palestinian on the terror watchlist for previous use of “explosives/arms” in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. In late July, Border Patrol agents arrested three Palestinian migrants with suspected terror ties for illegally crossing the border in California, including one with a picture on his phone of a man in a ski mask holding an AK-47 (one agent told the Post in that story, “I probably let terrorists into the country,” citing Border Patrol’s lack of access to foreign criminal or terrorism databases). And on Thursday, Border Patrol put out a warning for agents to be on the lookout for yet another Palestinian on the terror watchlist who was expected to attempt to cross the border near Santa Teresa. Reporter Ali Bradley confirmed Friday, however, that her Border Patrol sources in the Del Rio sector had not received the warning about the suspected Palestinian terrorist. They had, however, received a photo of Bradley, along with a warning not to speak to her. 

→Why did Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resign? We don’t know the inside story, but we can’t say we blame her. Leading an Ivy League university at the moment seems like one of the worst jobs in the United States. For instance, reporting from earlier this month suggested that Shafik wanted to give campus police officers the power of arrest—a sensible idea that was slammed by the faction of university faculty that thought free speech was an outdated and racist concept until they realized it was their best tool for defending illegal mob intimidation on campus. In a Friday report, The Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium gave outsiders a sense of what Shafik was dealing with: Two Columbia professors who sit on the university senate’s rules committee, which helps set and enforce rules governing student protests, participated in the campus occupation this spring. Photos obtained by Sibarium show Joseph Slaughter, an English professor, conversing with student protesters while holding a neon “protest marshal” vest (given to those in leadership or organization roles), and Susan Bernofsky, a professor of writing, standing guard outside a student encampment, also in a neon vest. 

→Not-a-Parody Screenshot of the Day:

That’s a screenshot of the portal to apply to work as a battleground political associate ($60,000-$65,000 a year) for the Harris-Walz campaign, listed on KamalaHarris.com. (We saw an image of the pronoun options on X and assumed it was a joke, but no, it’s real—we took that screenshot ourselves.) For those confused, hu/hu (pronounced “huh”) is gender-neutral pronoun created by Johns Hopkins professor DeAnn DeLuna (according to Google Gemini), while Fae/faer are “non-themed (pleopronouns) pronouns” or “nounself pronouns related to fay, fae, fey, fair folk, and/or faeries,” according to PronounWiki.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Last Man in Metula, by Tablet Audience Editors

VIDEO: Despite growing up in Israel’s northernmost town, where residents found Hezbollah tunnels under their houses and heard terrorists talking from their living rooms, Yaniv Elhadif never wanted to leave

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