Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

Although I’ve known Joshua Sharf from the blogging world for a couple of years, I’ve paid closer attention to his race for the State House of Representatives because of being his replacement here on the Gang of Four. It turns out that the race, especially the Republican primary, is very interesting as it pits Joshua, a politically-conservative Orthodox Jew, against Rima Barakat aka Rima Sinclair, described (I assume by herself, since it’s a bio of her as a speaker) as a “Palestinian-American business woman and translator…active in the Denver Muslim community.”

For the record, although I do not live in Joshua’s district, I have made a very small contribution to his campaign. I do not work for his campaign in any paid or volunteer status.

Much has been already discovered and written about Ms. Barakat’s anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli affiliations and statements, but it’s so shocking to me that someone like Ms. Barakat could have been selected as the GOP’s initial nominee in House District 6, the most Jewish district in the state. Are all the Jews in the district Democrats? They really must not have been paying attention, but I bet they are now….

Rima Barakat calls herself Rima Sinclair on her campaign web site, but Rima Barakat on her Facebook page.

A browse through her Facebook friends is instructive. Here’s a particularly interesting one:

Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian activist who is a Board Member of “The Association for One Democratic State in Israel/Palestine” (which is code for the destruction of Israel.) Qumsiyeh was, for a time, a Yale University biologist, did not have his contract renewed by Yale because he sent an e-mail to a Yale anti-war group giving them the membership of a Yale pro-Israel group and calling them a “pro-war cabal”. Qumsiyeh is also a founder of “Boycott Israeli Goods” and participant in web sites such as “The Electronic Intifada”.

Qumsiyeh is the author of a “statement of support” for Barakat which is the basis for a petition being circulated by the “International Solidarity Movement”, a pro-Palestinian group whose most famous member is probably the late Rachel Corrie, who was crushed under a bulldozer whose driver didn’t see her as she was enacting the group’s direct goal of “confronting tanks and demolition equipment”. Although it has not been proven that the ISM was aware of their goals, the two British citizens who murdered three and injured over 50 in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in 2003 had met with ISM just prior to the bombing and maybe have been aided by ISM in gaining entry into Israel. While ISM claims to be non-violent, their words as well as actions of their members cast doubt on those claims. Here’s another interesting article about someone who covertly went to an ISM training meeting in California.

Another organization which appears to be taking an interest in Rima Barakat’s political well-being is the Council for the National Interest (“CNI”), a pro-Palestinian group founded by American politicians and bureaucrats. CNI recently sponsored a trip for several people to meet with “officials and activists in Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank”. One of those travelers, a former US diplomat, who had his picture taken with Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas, just a few days ago and who called Haniya a “thoughtful politician”.

Steve Emerson, probably the nation's leading expert on activities in the US of Islamic terrorist organizations and their supporters, offered his view of CNI in a radio interview. He noted that "it pretends to be in support of the national interest. What it doesn't say is that it's not the US national interest. It's more often the Saudi national interest. It's one mission is to destroy public support for Israel and for anything that smacks of fighting radical Islam."

Rima Barakat’s anti-Israeli rantings are well known. Here’s a brief review of two:

A YouTube video in which she claims, among other things, that Israel is “imprisoning millions of people” and that “Israeli soldiers are known to be bombing and killing babies.”

An opinion piece written by Barakat in 2006 in which she equates the Israeli relationship with Palestinians “slavery, apartheid, and Nazi concentration camps” and, regarding American Jews, says that “these atrocities (in the Palestinian territories) continue to be committed in their names.” She adds that “the world sees” (more likely she sees) “the United States as a collaborator”.

Of course, Barakat doesn’t see just the Palestinians as victims of America, but she sees herself that way too (as well as a victim of her own political party). In a Denver County Republican Breakfast, on June 5, Barakat claimed that “the Republican Party, national and in Colorado, including Mr. Schaffer, they declare war on anything called illegal immigrants, on anything called Arab-American, on anything called Muslim.”

Woe is Rima. The GOP has declared war against her, she says…which must explain how someone with no apparent qualifications got the initial nod to be the party’s candidate in November. (Apparently she claimed to be pro-live to get the nomination, although apparently she said in a 2004 Rocky Mountain News article that she “would like a pro-choice president.”)

Muslim radicals have encouraged American Muslims to achieve a stealth jihad here by running for political office. Democratic allies of this attack on the foundation of America, even if they are unwitting, have a lot to answer for. In September, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told American Muslims at a meeting near Chicago "You need to run for political office. The only way you can achieve your goals is to stand up and say who you are and be proud of it." Doesn’t he understand what some of those goals are?

I admit that I often think the Democratic leadership is out of touch with reality and anti-American. (This is not to say that I think the GOP leadership is a bunch of geniuses but at least I don’t question which nation they want to succeed.) But this was a Republican assembly that sanctioned the candidacy of a woman who admires Yasser Arafat and terrorist “scholars”. I don’t know who Ms. Barakat beat at the assembly, when she got the nod by a 2-vote margin, but I can’t imagine what the assembly participants must have been thinking or how embarrassed they must be now. Of course Ms. Barakat is free to believe and say whatever nonsense she wants to. But even in a district where a Republican is a longshot to win, the GOP, the state, and the nation can not risk a Muslim Manchurian Candidate.

Ms. Barakat deserves to be soundly beaten at the Republican primary in August, and I hope that District 6 voters, especially many of my fellow Jews, will come to realize that there’s absolutely no rational reason that Jews should so reflexively vote for Democrats when the Democratic Party, other than the unusual case of the anti-Semitic Rima Barakat, is now the home of the most active, outspoken, and influential opponents of Israel.