Aug. 9, 2024: Tim Walz Paid, Hosted Hitler-Loving Imam

New cease-fire talks set to begin; Why Kamala won't talk to the press; Smartmatic CEO indicted by DOJ

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The Big Story

The more we learn about Tim Walz, the more we think he’s a perfect partner for Kamala Harris. 

For instance, as governor of Minnesota, he’s cultivated excellent relations with one of the modern Democratic Party’s most important domestic and international constituencies: the Muslim Brotherhood. Yesterday, we reported on Walz’s photo op with Hatem Bazian, the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (a material support enterprise for Muslim Brotherhood-affiliate Hamas, according to an ongoing lawsuit), at a 2019 event hosted by the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (also a Hamas front; see our previous reporting here). 

But Walz doesn’t play favorites with Muslim Brotherhood fronts—he shares the wealth! Literally, that is: His administration gave more than $100,000 in taxpayer money to the Minnesota Chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS). What is the MAS? Well, according to the U.S. federal prosecutors in the 2004 case United States v. Sabri Benkahla, MAS was founded as “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.” It was in that capacity that a U.S. ally, the United Arab Emirates, designated MAS (along with CAIR) as a terrorist group in 2014. You can see what the Emiratis were thinking: Here’s a 2019 video of “Ummah Day” at MAS Philadelphia, featuring the sort of thing you’d normally associate with Muslim Brotherhood-run schools in the Gaza Strip (i.e., children talking about lopping the heads off of Jews):

 The revelation about MAS comes from a Friday article in the Washington Examiner, which also exposes Walz’s cozy relationship with MAS Minnesota’s leader, Imam Asad Zaman. Walz officially hosted Mr. Zaman on at least five occasions as governor, and even invited the good imam to deliver an invocation at Walz’s 2019 state address. Zaman, however, has made some interesting posts on his Facebook. Of course, there are the usual statements of support for Oct. 7 and Palestinian “self-defense” against the “extremist Zionist regime.” Indeed, Zaman posted on Oct. 7 that “MAS stands in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli attacks.” 

Zaman is also interested in history—especially the revisionist history of World War II. For instance, here he is on Facebook sharing a link to the neo-Nazi documentary Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story Never Told:

Mr. Zaman probably just needs to attend one of Doug Emhoff’s “interfaith roundtables” to learn about the White House’s efforts to “counter hate and restore unity.” They could even make a campaign event out of it! Coach schools imam. That would be so brat. 

But it’s not just Walz’s cozying up to literal supporters of antisemitic terror while bloviating about “hate” that makes him a great fit on the ticket; it’s also his confusion about the First Amendment, as seen here:

And his folksy, down-home, not-at-all weird commitment to unconstitutional racial bean-counting in public employment. Last May, The Washington Free Beacon reported on Friday, Walz signed a bill: 

that established racial quotas throughout the state's health department, from a requirement that two members of a pregnancy task force be ‘Black or African American’ to rules governing the composition of a ‘health equity’ council…

The council on pregnancy and substance abuse, for example, must include ‘two members who identify as Black or African American,’ ‘two members who identify as Native American,’ and two additional members who are ‘Tribal representatives appointed by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council.’ Other councils have quotas for Hispanics, Asian Americans, ‘LGBTQIA+’ people, and the disabled.

Lawyers who reviewed the bill told the Beacon that the requirements were “patently unconstitutional and would be easy pickings for a plaintiff.” 

Indeed, it makes sense that Walz was interested in “health equity,” given that Minnesota was at the forefront of experiments in “health equity” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following guidance from the Biden-Harris administration’s Food and Drug Administration, Minnesota’s Department of Health developed an “ethical framework” for how to ration scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, such as monoclonal antibodies. “BIPOC status” was awarded two points, the same amount as diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and one point more than “hypertension in a patient 55 years or older.” 

As Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon noted at the time, the state’s formula meant that a Black 18-year-old would be privileged over a white 64-year-old, despite the latter being at far higher risk of severe COVID-19. Seems a little weird to us. 

Read more about Walz and Imam Zaman here. 

And read about Walz and the racial quotas here. 

 IN THE BACK PAGES: Kenneth Sherman on how his father, a tailor, dressed the half-Jewish Robbie Robertson and his gang of “hillbilly” friends—known to history as The Band

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The Rest

→On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that an Israeli delegation will attend a new round of cease-fire talks beginning Aug. 15, following a Thursday joint statement from President Joe Biden and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar declaring that “there is no further time to waste nor excuses from any party for further delay.” But Hamas, under the new leadership of Yahya Sinwar, appears to be toughening its negotiating position. The National reported Thursday that Sinwar had conveyed an “uncompromising” stance to Egyptian negotiators, demanding, among other things, the release of high-level Palestinian prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and indicating that he is “uncompromisingly” opposed to Palestinian Authority governance in postwar Gaza and to the presence of a multinational security force. On Friday, The Times of Israel reported, citing Arabic-language media, that “Hamas has demanded Barghouti’s release as the terror group knows it cannot return to power in the Gaza Strip and sees the former head of Fatah’s Tanzim terrorist faction as a useful ally it could trust to run the Strip according to its liking.”

→Kamala Harris has not taken a single question from a journalist since receiving Joe Biden’s endorsement on July 22. Why not? Because she’s currently riding high in the polls, and as Byron York of The Washington Examiner explains, there’s been a Kamala boom and bust cycle before, back in 2019:

Harris declared her candidacy in January 2019. By April, her support stood at 5% in the CNN poll of the Democratic primary race. (All the numbers here are from subsequent CNN polls, conducted with the same methodology.) By May, Harris had climbed to 8%. Then, in the June poll, she jumped up to 17%. There was no poll in July, but by August, Harris was back down to 5%. She meandered around after that—8% in September, 6% in October, 3% in November—and by December, she was out of the race.

In other words, Kamala rose rapidly, only to fall as voters saw more of her. But now she has the party, and most of the media, unified behind her to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

Read it here. 

→In April, we dedicated a lot of attention to the mistaken Israeli airstrike on a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen—a tragedy that the Obama-Biden echo chamber spun into a faux moral emergency that led to (A) Biden’s first call for an “immediate cease-fire” and (B) public demands from White House surrogates for the U.S. to embargo arms to Israel. Biden officials even anonymously told Politico that they suspected the Israelis had intentionally murdered the aid workers. (“Three hits on three cars in a row is not an accident. We’re not stupid.”)

Well, last week, Australia released the results of its official investigation into the WCK convoy strike, conducted by former Australian Air Force head Mark Binskin, who concluded that the strike was “not knowingly or deliberately directed at the WCK.” As we suggested would likely prove to be the case back in April, the strike, like similar incidents such as the U.S. military’s accidental shelling of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan in 2015, was the product of confusion, communication breakdown, and a lack of “situational awareness” in an inherently confusing warzone. Binskin also notes, in his report, that WCK had hired armed gunmen to act as security for the convoy—but did not notify the IDF. This led the IDF surveillance team in the region to mistakenly identify the gunmen as Hamas. However, Binskin notes, echoing previous statements from IDF officials, that the subsequent strikes on the vehicles in the convoy failed to adhere to the IDF’s rules of engagement. 

→In other White House slander news, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant Friday that the United States would not be sanctioning the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion for “gross human rights violations.” Why? Well, because the IDF had—before the entire sanctions charade ever started—investigated the abuse charges, discharged the soldiers responsible for the “most significant incident” (in Axios’s words), and imposed other remedial measures. So why throw out the possibility of sanctions in the first place? Because the process is the punishment—you throw out highly public allegations that the IDF is full of psychopathic human rights abusers, and then, months later, when the damage is done and nobody cares anymore, you quietly walk it back. 

→Three current and former executives from Smartmatic, the voting machine company currently suing Fox News and Newsmax, were indicted by the Department of Justice on Thursday for participating in a bribery and money-laundering scheme in the Philippines. The DOJ alleges that Smartmatic founder and president, Venezuelan American Roger Piñate, and three co-conspirators—including the brother-in-law of current Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica—paid at least $1 million in bribes to the former top election official in the Philippines “to obtain and retain business related to providing voting machines and election services for the 2016 Philippine elections.” The bribes were paid out of a slush fund created by over-invoicing the Philippine government for voting machines. 

Smartmatic was at the center of stolen election claims made by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and other Trump allies in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which prompted the company’s lawsuits against Fox, Newsmax, and One America News Network. However, in 2020, Smartmatic provided voting machines to only one U.S. county: deep-blue Los Angeles. 

→Stat of the Day: 6,303

That’s how many noncitizens were registered to vote in Virginia prior to being removed from the rolls between 2022 and 2024, according to a Thursday executive order from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin tightening ballot security measures ahead of the November election. According to a June 14 report in the New York Post, 46 states currently provide voter registration forms to migrants at welfare agencies and the Department of Motor Vehicles; if the person attests they are a U.S. citizen, they are registered to vote without needing to provide proof of citizenship. That’s the theory, at least. On Reddit, however, one can find plenty of examples of noncitizens who were told by state employees that they were eligible to vote:

Only three states—Virginia, Tennessee, and New Mexico—require would-be voters to provide a valid Social Security number to complete voter registration. 

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Robbie Robertson’s Tailor

How my father and his brothers suited up Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and the rest of The Band

by Kenneth Sherman

According to my father, it was Harold “the Colonel” Kudlets, a talent broker in Hamilton, Ontario, who brought Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm up to Canada. Kudlets, a Glasgow-born Jew, knew Charlie Halbert, an agent down in Helena, Arkansas, who’d sent Conway Twitty up north a year earlier. In the spring of 1958, Kudlets booked Hawkins and his band, The Hawks, into Hamilton’s Golden Rail Tavern, and later, at two spots in Toronto: Le Coq d’Or, on the Yonge Street strip, and the Concord Tavern, located farther west on Bloor Street.

The Concord was the toughest bar in Toronto. To be a waiter there you had to also qualify as a bouncer. In his memoir, Testimony, Robbie Robertson remembers Big Lou, who manned the front doors and “whom everybody was fond of unless he had punched you in the face and thrown you down the stairs.”

Jack Fisher owned the Concord. He was one of the few men in Toronto at that time with a licence to carry a handgun, a snub-nose .38 to be exact. When fights got out of hand at the Concord, he would fire warning shots above the brawlers. In a 1967 CBC interview, Ronnie Hawkins said he was used to that sort of scene. In the deep South he had played what he called “the skid-row circuit,” sleazy dives where patrons carried knives and guns.

Fisher had his suits made at Sherman Custom Tailors, a shop started by my grandfather Sam during the early days of the Great Depression. The business was eventually taken over by my father and his two brothers Willy and Solly. When Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm showed up at the Concord their stage suits were worn out. “Shiny in the ass,” Jack Fisher noted. He brought the boys down to my father’s shop and paid for their new suits. My father remembers the first time they came in. It was the summer of 1958 and Hawkins and Helm wore shoes without socks. He measured them up and when they returned for their try-ons, he noticed they wore no underpants.

“Hillbillies,” my father called them. “Good musicians, but real hillbillies.” On Ronnie’s invitation, my father and uncles would go to hear them play a few times a year. My father was a big band aficionado. He had stacks of old brittle 78s and a large collection of LPs featuring Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Artie Shaw. He would return from an evening of listening to Rompin’ Ronnie’s rock ’n’ roll, and tell me, “Not my kind of music, but they put on a helluva show.”

Ronnie Hawkins was a loyal customer. Still, my father felt he took chances when he dealt with musicians. He liked to tell the story of Joe King (Grubstein) who fronted a local group called The Zaniacs. Joe owed my father money for the suits he’d ordered. When my father went to collect from him at his room at the Edison Hotel, Joe got wind of it and as my father was climbing the steps to his room, Joe King was scuttling down the fire escape.

***

When Ronnie brought his band down the following year to make new suits, he had taken on the 16-year-old Robbie Robertson. By 1961, the band also included Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson, all from southwestern Ontario. Later on, in the mid-’60s, as The Hawks (soon to become The Band) made more money, they went to the more stylish and legendary Lou Myles, who was considered the premier clothier in Toronto; his clientele included Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Muhammad Ali. But when The Hawks were playing their hearts out every night at the Concord, my father’s tailor shop was (excuse the pun) a perfect fit.

When I hear The Band’s “Life Is a Carnival,” or think of the cast of characters in “The Weight,” (Crazy Chester, Carmen, Luke, etc.) I am reminded of Sherman Custom Tailors. The place was, besides being a thriving business, a magnet for misfits. There was toothless Wild Bill, the thin denizen of College Street, who swept the floor and ran errands for my father; muscular Marvin, the delivery boy who could tear a Toronto white-pages telephone book in half; Maxie the mortgage broker, who used the store as his “office” and paced nervously by the wall phone while puffing on a cigar; and Henry Suchow, the pickpocket who wore a French beret. Each day he’d come and try to hawk what he’d stolen while riding the downtown buses and streetcars.

Hey, buddy, would you like to buy a watch real cheap Here on the street I got six on each arm and two more round my feet — Lyrics from “Life Is a Carnival”

What did The Hawks see when they entered Sherman Custom Tailors? On either side hung suit lengths, 75 in total. Ronnie and the boys could run their fingers over mohair, serge, flannel, nap, hopsack, and twill. They could marvel at the various patterns: houndstooth, herringbone, birds-eye, sharkskin, pinstripe, chalk stripe, check. If nothing in those suit lengths appealed, my father would lug out heavy sample books from the back room and explain that the satin came from jobbers in Montreal; the finest Harris tweed came from Leeds and the Hebrides.

My father wore his measuring tape like a thin prayer shawl, draped around his shoulders. After taking the measurements he’d fill out the order sheet. Pleats or no pleats? Cuffs or no cuffs? Western-style pockets or slant? Loops for a belt or suspenders? There was a small change room and a triple-sided mirror into which an assortment of figures, most of them awkward and disproportional, stepped. It was not uncommon that a customer, gazing at himself in the mirror after the suit had been finished, would offer vague complaints.

“Something’s not right.”

“What’s not right?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

Met with such ontological despair, my father would call his top tailor, Vince, from the back of the shop. Vince would assess the fit and in a quiet voice say, “Maybe I can take in a little here.” After one customer left, I recall my father saying, “Get that. The guy’s a hunchback, and he expects me to make him look like Gary Cooper.”

Over the mirror was a large mural, painted after the Second World War by a recently arrived refugee who needed a suit but had no money to pay for it. My grandfather bartered the suit for the mural. In one section, a man in a mocha brown double-breasted suit held a set of binoculars close to his chest. In the background, jockeys in billowing blouses of pastel yellow, orange, and green rode sleek, elongated racehorses. The man’s suit was an advertisement for the tailor shop, with the jockeys and horses an homage, perhaps, to Degas.

When you stepped into the back of the shop you entered yet another world. On the right were towering wooden cribs stacked with bolts of cloth. There was a rack where large garment patterns, the colour of dried blood, dangled like sides of beef. On the left was a long cutting table and underneath, huge cardboard cartons for the scraps of discarded cloth. This is where my uncle Willy, a cutter, wielded his shears. The wall above the cutting table was plastered with pages torn out of girlie magazines. My uncle curated these, changing them on a monthly basis. As the years went by, the photos became more and more risqué, though there was one photograph that my uncle never took down. It was a black-and-white publicity shot of a famous stripper and was signed: To the Sherman boys, love, Chesty.

According to my father, Ronnie and the boys liked to linger at Uncle Willy’s gallery:

If I were a barker in a girlie show Tell ya what I’d do, I’d lock the door Tear my shirt and let my river flow — Lyrics from “Jemima Surrender”

At the very back of the store you’d hear the Gatling gun clatter of the Singer sewing machines. You’d hear Jewish and Italian tailors conversing in broken English. By their elbows were small boxes containing waxy tailor’s chalk, Gillette razor blades, an assortment of pins. The sleek, triangular head of my grandfather’s 1930 press-iron reminded me of the head of a prehistoric pterodactyl that I’d first seen in my children’s book on dinosaurs.

The shop’s informality was typified by the three cats my father kept and which he allowed to roam freely. He’d named them, Shvartz Katz, Rabinovitz, and No-Neck, and they were as quirky as some of the clientele. When my father and my uncles stroked their backs, they would meow in unison.

***

Toronto was filled with musical cats in those days. The Hawks were key players in a scene happening in the taverns along the Yonge Street strip between Gerrard and Queen, only a 10-minute streetcar ride from my father’s store. At the Brown Derby, the Silver Rail, the Zanzibar, and Friar’s Tavern you could catch performers such as David Clayton Thomas of Blood, Sweat, and Tears fame, Robbie Lane and the Disciples, The Sparrows (later Steppenwolf), the Mynah Birds with Neil Young, and the incomparable soul singer Jackie Shane. Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks had a permanent gig at the Hawk’s Nest, which is where my father would go to hear them.

In the early ’60s an entirely different scene was slowly developing in the city’s Yorkville area. At coffee houses like the Purple Onion and The Riverboat you could hear Joni Anderson (later, Joni Mitchell), Tim Hardin, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, Buffy Sainte Marie, and Ian and Sylvia. Yorkville became "hippie central" with head shops and vintage clothing stores.

Musicians didn’t adhere strictly to the cultural division. For instance, Gord Lightfoot played Yorkville and Yonge Street, as did Neil Young. But the audiences were markedly different. As Robbie Robertson said, “The people who watched us weren’t the sort to sip cappuccinos.” My friends and I read Camus and hung out in Yorkville every weekend. We thought of the Yonge Street crowd as uncouth. Those red-lit, red-carpeted taverns were situated next to stores selling kinky lingerie and skin magazines. Greasers in their souped-up Chevy Novas liked to lay rubber on the street.

When Bob Dylan, a performer from the Yorkville side of things, arrived in Toronto in September of 1965 and hired The Hawks as the backup band for his upcoming tour, he ended the great divide, amalgamating the Yorkville folk world with Yonge Street’s kingdom of rock. This blend would result in the most dynamic music of the next decade.

***

My father saw Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm as gifted “hillbillies,” but one wonders how they saw him. When they first brought their young guitarist, Robbie Robertson, to the store, he had recently been told by his mother, Dolly, that his biological father was not Jim Robertson, the man they’d been living with, but a Toronto Jew named Alex Klegerman, who had been killed in a highway accident before Robbie was born. She introduced Robbie to his father’s brothers Morrie and Natie. Robertson spent considerable time with them and their families and so the Jewish vibe of my father’s tailor shop, where English was interspersed with Yiddish, and sarcasm reigned, would not have been foreign to him.

Years later I asked my father if he had known the Klegerman brothers. “They dealt in fake and stolen diamonds,” he told me. “They did much of their business in Holland. I remember, one of them wound up in prison.”

Robertson’s mother, Dolly, was a Mohawk, from the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario. On weekends she would take him to visit her relatives there. Robertson was impressed with his uncles’ storytelling prowess and musicianship. They were the ones who encouraged him to take up the guitar and who offered advice: “Be proud you are an Indian, but be careful who you tell.”

Robertson learned to apply the same caution in revealing his Jewish roots. In one of the more poignant moments of Testimony, he describes driving to a gig in Hamilton. He’s telling Levon Helm about his Jewish father and uncles. Ronnie Hawkins is asleep in the back of the car. Helm exclaims,

“Oh, man”—you’re Jewish? How about that!”

At that moment, Ronnie rustled awake. “What, who’s a Jew? Let me check and make sure I still got my damn wallet … You better pull the car over and shake him down.”

“Aye, aye, Ron,” said Levon. “Next chance I get, I’ll turn his pockets inside out.”

“Bad enough he was a redskin, now he’s a Jew on top of that.”

“I’m afraid so,” I laughed. “Yeah, you could say I’m an expert when it comes to persecution.”

Testimony shows Robbie Robertson possessing a remarkable, self-protective mechanism whereby he would turn potentially painful incidents into positives. He ends the chapter telling the reader that being “looked at differently” gave him a certain prestige. He believed it drew his bandmates closer.

Hawkins’ response might be seen as the typical antisemitism of a small-town Southerner. In interviews, he never uses the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” The terms obviously made him uncomfortable. He always substitutes “Hebrew,” which may have sounded more dignified to his ear. In a documentary on The Band, Hawkins calls Robertson’s father “a Hebrew gangster.”

Late in Hawkins’ career, Sony released a best of Ronnie Hawkins album “Can’t Stop Rockin’.” At that time my cousin Jamie Greenspan was working for Sony. One evening he drove Hawkins to see Bill Clinton, his fellow Arkansan, who was giving a UJA address at Toronto’s Hummingbird Centre. On the way, Jamie asked Hawkins about my father and uncles, and he described them as “Hebrew gentlemen of the highest order.” When he introduced Jamie to Clinton, he said, “I’d like you to meet Jamie, a Hebrew of the highest order.” When Jamie asked him about Robbie Robertson, Hawkins said “The Hebrew side manages the Native side and the Hebrew side is doing quite well.”

You can read that in different ways, of course. Is he implying that the Hebrew side acts as a superego restraining the Native (id) side? Is he implying that the Hebrew side exploits the Native? There’s a YouTube video of Bob Dylan discussing Ronnie Hawkins: “He looks like a shitkicker,” Dylan remarks, “but he speaks with the wisdom of a sage.”

The last time my father made suits for The Hawks was in late 1961. They were strapped for cash and made a modest down payment, promising to pay the remainder within the year. They were struggling to make ends meet. If you’d told them that in nine years, they’d have their faces caricatured for the cover of Time magazine, they would have thought you were crazy. In four years, Bob Dylan would fly into Toronto and sweep them away, like a genie, to places they had only dreamed of. A few years after that they would hole up in the storied pink house in Woodstock and develop a sound for the ages.

My father’s business would also prosper for the next 15 years. Men wore suits for work and for going out and custom-made suits had not yet been outflanked by those you could buy off the rack. But things rapidly changed, and the end of a centuries’ old tradition was noted on Sept. 25, 1977, when The New York Times ran an article titled, “The Vanishing Custom Tailor.” By the late ’80s, my father and his brothers made only the occasional suit. Their dwindling business depended on selling cloth to itinerant Italian, Portuguese, and Jamaican tailors who would then sell to the immigrant communities. It was heartbreaking to go into the empty store and see the Sherman brothers sitting in chairs once reserved for waiting customers, talking about the old days.

The Band’s end date came around the same time. On Nov. 25, 1976, they gave their final performance at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The years after their breakup were marked by acrimony, drug addiction, and suicide, though it’s notable that Robbie Robertson weathered his post-Band years far better than his bandmates.

There is a coda to this story. My father had a ritual when he came home from work each day. He’d remove his fedora and trench coat and wash his hands before he would come into our den where we had a built-in stereo system and above that, a built-in bar. My father would pour himself a shot of Seagram’s Crown whiskey. Sometimes, he’d toss back two, depending on the degree of aggravation the day had brought him. In July of 1968, Capitol Records released The Band’s Music From Big Pink and I bought a copy after hearing a few tracks at a friend’s house. I was playing the record and had the album cover open, next to the bar. My father, after throwing back a shot, glanced down at the photo of the guys he’d known as The Hawks. He did a double take, as they now had beards and long hair and country clothes.

“Don’t tell me those guys made it,” he said.

“It seems so,” I answered.

“How do you like that?” he said.

He shook his head from side to side.

And then he said,

“Those guys still owe me money.”