Last year marked half a century since Palestinian terrorists abducted, tortured and murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The 50th anniversary did not get the attention it deserved, and a key sequel escaped attention.
The mastermind of the massacre was Muhammad Abu Yousef al-Najjar. His grandson, calling himself Ammar Campa-Najjar, worked on Obama’s 2012 campaign, served in the Obama White House and federal Labor Department, and ran for Congress in California in 2018 and 2020. How that all came about is a matter of some mystery.
In 1973, Israeli commandos killed Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar and his wife in Beirut. Muhamad’s son Yasser al-Najjar, a fugitive, lived in Egypt until 1981. According to the official story, Yasser moved to San Diego County and met his wife Abigail, of Mexican extraction. Trouble is, in 2003 Linda Gradstein of National Public Radio interviewed Yasser al-Najjar at his office in Gaza, where he served with the Palestinian Authority. Yasser was married, with four children but his wife and children were not named.
Gradstein did not ask Yasser al-Najjar how or when he entered the United States, and when he earned his MBA from San Diego State. Al-Najjar did not volunteer the information, and none of it emerged in 2012 when Ammar Campa-Najjar served on Obama’s reelection campaign and secured a position in the White House.
In a 2017 op-ed piece in The Hill, Campa-Najjar came billed as a “Mexican-Palestinian American and former Obama campaign and administration official.” He claimed his father “migrated from the Middle East to America on a student visa,” but provided no dates or documentation for the migration.
“I was born in San Diego, then lived in Gaza from ages 8 to 12,” Yasser’s son explains. The time in Gaza, Campa-Najjar told Rolling Stone, was “very Obamaesque, Dreams of your Father, situation.” He came billed him as “a rockstar Democratic candidate,” but on February 20, 2018, the Israeli Haaretz broke the news that “Grandson of Munich Massacre Terrorist Is Running for Congress.”
The Munichian candidate would doubtless have been a vocal addition to the Democrats’ pro-Palestinian “Squad,” but he lost to Duncan Hunter in 2018 and to Darrell Issa in 2020. In 2022, Muhammad Abu Yousef al-Najjar’s grandson ran for mayor of Chula Vista, California, and lost to Republican John McCann. The grandson of the Munich massacre terrorist will doubtless be back, and the lessons should be clear.
Voters and candidates alike should be subject to background checks requiring full documentation and use of DNA testing where necessary. The struggle against Islamic terrorism is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Last year, few took the trouble to name the victims of the Munich terrorist massacre. The current Hamas attack makes it appropriate to do so now: David Berger, Ze’ev Friedman, Yossef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Yossef Romano, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Yakov Springer and Moshe Weinberg.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.