Hamas-CAIR Honors Jamaal Bowman

Jamaal Bowman is the anti-Israel and antisemitic Congressman, a member of the extended Squad, who was defeated in the Democratic primary by George Latimer, and as of this January, will no longer be a member of the House. Perhaps he will go to work for CAIR, which has just honored him with its “Champion of Justice” award.

More on CAIR’s honoring Bowman can be found here.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) announced that it will honor outgoing US Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who lost his reelection bid earlier this year, with its 2024 Champion of Justice award at an upcoming event.

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CAIR tapped Bowman, one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in the US Congress, to serve as the keynote speaker of its 30th annual Gala in Washington, DC next month. According to the organization’s website, the event will focus on “unlocking American Muslim power at home and abroad.”

CAIR bills itself as a “civil rights organization,” but in truth, it is about increasing Muslim political power in the United States and influencing the foreign policy of the United States, so that Israel will be abandoned by its indispensable ally. CAIR hopes Israel will ultimately be replaced “from the river to the sea” by a 23rd Arab state.

“Marking 30 years of defending and advancing justice and religious freedoms for American Muslims, CAIR’s 30th Anniversary Gala will celebrate a storied, accomplished legacy and unlock American Muslim power with an unwavering commitment for justice and equality,” the group said of the event. “The time is now to build a just and free future for generations to come.”

CAIR will honor Bowman for defending the Palestinian people in the face of so-called “genocidal” assaults from Israel.

“He was one of the first members of Congress with the moral courage to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and has consistently condemned the Israeli government’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people,” CAIR said. “AIPAC spent more than $14 million to silence his voice. In response, Rep. Bowman vowed to continue advocating for the liberation of Palestine.”

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CAIR was referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, pouring money into Bowman’s Democratic primary race this year to unseat him.

Of course AIPAC spent large sums to defeat someone as full of loathing for Israel as Jamaal Bowman. There is nothing wrong with that. CAIR spends money to support those candidates who are anti-Israel. It just happens not to have the same resources as AIPAC.

Bowman has repeatedly lambasted the Jewish state as a “white supremacist” entity, escalating his rhetoric in the months following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel last year. In the past year, the congressman has made unsubstantiated allegations that Israel has conducted a “genocide” in Gaza while accusing the Jewish state of committing “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing” against Palestinians in the West Bank. He also came under fire for initially dismissing widely-corroborated accusations of rape against Israeli women by Hamas terrorists as “propaganda.”

Bowman’s charge that Israel has been committing “genocide” in Gaza is absurd. About 42,000 people have died in Gaza in the first year of the war. Of those, at least 20,000 were Hamas combatants. Before the war, about 800 Gazans died each month from diseases and accidents, so in the first year of the Gaza war about 9600 people died of non-war-related deaths. That means that only 12,400 of the 22,000 civilian deaths were war-related.

Jamaal Bowman also failed to recognize the IDF’s elaborate system of warning civilians away from areas, and buildings, about to be targeted. Already by last March the IDF had dropped nine million leaflets, sent fifteen million messages, and made sixteen million robocalls, to warn civilians. Furthermore, Israeli pilots routinely halt or abort mission, whenever civilians are detected as too close to the targets. For Israel has always tried to minimize civilian casualties, just as Hamas has tried to maximize them. The key metric for judging the conduct of wars is the civilian-to-combatant ratio. The UN has said that in all the wars since 1945, that ratio has on average been 9:1. In Afghanistan, the Americans attained a ratio of 4:1, and in Iraq of 3:1. But the IDF in Gaza has achieved the unheard of low ratio of 12.4:22, or far less than 1:1, which has not been attained by any other army in the world. Referring to the IDF’s warning of civilians, British Colonel Richard Kemp has called the IDF “the most moral army in history,” and West Point Professor John Spencer, who studies urban warfare, has said that “Israel has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties in urban warfare than any other military in the history of war. Jamaal Bowman knows better.