CAIR’s Congressional candidate and more

Joel Mowbray has fashioned his investigation into the friends of Keith Ellison into a column for FrontPage: “CAIR’s congressional candidate.” Joel’s FrontPage column is derived from the column he submitted to the St. Paul Pioneer Press for publication as an op-ed column last week. In “Joel Mowbray reports: CAIR’s candidate? Part 2” Joel describes how Ellison slow-rolled his response to the column with the result that the Pioneer Press spiked it.

The Washington Post also takes a stab at covering Ellison in a page A3 story by Alan Cooperman today: “Muslim candidate plays defense.” Cooperman appears to have come to Minneapolis and interviewed Ellison. It’s a shame that he was unable to get the most basic fact about Ellison’s shifting Nation of Islam identities straight. Cooperman writes:

Michael Brodkorb, author of a Republican blog called MinnesotaDemocratsExposed.com, dug up two articles that Ellison had written under the name of Keith Hakim for the University of Minnesota student newspaper when he was in law school there in 1989 and 1990.

The first article defended Farrakhan against accusations of anti-Semitism. The second called affirmative action a “sneaky” form of compensation for slavery, suggesting instead that white Americans pay reparations to blacks.

Another conservative blog, PowerLineBlog.com, subsequently revealed that the candidate had used the names Keith X Ellison and Keith Ellison-Muhammed during his student days.

As we have demonstrated here repeatedly — see, for example, “Who is Keith Ellison? (2)” — Ellison assumed these identities over the period 1989-1998. Ellison used the name Keith Hakim only as a University of Minnesota law student. Ellison used the name Keith X Ellison in 1995 while he was admittedly active in the Nation of Islam. Ellison subsequently went under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad. Ellison ran for public office in 1998 as a self-identified member of the Nation of Islam under the name Keith Ellison-Muhammad. Yet here Cooperman attributes these names to Ellison “during his student days” and elsewhere in the article he remains clueless that Ellison’s Nation of Islam activity extended as a matter of undisputable fact well beyond any 18-month period and well beyond the Million Man March in 1995. Moreover, Cooperman simply quotes Ellison:

“I never said anything that was anti-Semitic, racist, homophobic in any way.” But, he said, he was slow to judge those who did.

Yet Ellison did sponsor those who said such things, bringing in Kwame Ture to speak at the University of Minnesota Law School, for example, despite the heated requests of his Jewish classmates that he withdraw his sponosorship. See “Who is Keith Ellison? (5)” In 1995 Ellison also appeared with Khalid Muhammed when Muahmmaed spoke at the University of Minnesota and gave one of his patented racist and anti-Semitic diatribes. See “Who is Keith Ellison? (10)” And Ellison himelf did say such things as a representative of the Nation of Islam in 1997. See “Who is Keith Ellison? (2)” above.

Cooperman, however, is to my knowledge the first reporter to ask Ellison about Ellison’s public association with Minneaoplis gang leader and murderer Sharif Willis:

He said he defended a leader of the Vice Lords gang, Sharif Willis, because Willis was working with local police to broker a gang peace.

Very interesting. Now can we find out why Ellison was leading demonstrations against the Minneapolis police with Willis after four of Willis’s Vice Lords gangbangers shot Minneapolis police officer Jerry Haaf in the back?

That too is undoubtedly explained by Ellison’s quest for “peace.” Ellison chanted, “We don’t get no justice, you don’t get no peace” outside the courthouse in support of one of Willis’s Vice Lords gangbangers who was being tried and convicted for the murder of Officer Haaf.