An anti-Israel organization that receives significant investigations from Democratic megadonor George Soros has seen its best employees make 60 visits to the White House for high-level sessions during President Joe Biden’s presidency, according to data.
Emgage cited Khurrum Wahid, an attorney who was apparently with-radicalism/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” title=””>placed on a national criminal watch record and has a track record of associating with Arab Brotherhood-linked parties, as one of its rulers. He also cited Israel for supposedly provoking Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault last month.
The Biden-Harris administration’s regular White House visits demonstrate how national anti-Israel groups then-his-white-house-hosted-her/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” title=””>have swayed public opinion and gained a seat at the table. Republicans and pro-Israel groups are still pressing for a peace in the Middle East turmoil, much to the chagrin of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Israeli forces announced on Sunday that they had recovered the bodies of six Jewish victims who had been abducted by Hamas jihadists next year. The victims were discovered in a pipe in Rafah, a southeastern city in Gaza, where Biden has urged Israel to stay.
Emgage, which was formed in 2006,  , describes , itself as ,” a community of businesses dedicated to building democratic power for Muslim Americans”.
Federal Election Commission filings reveal that the Emgage umbrella includes Soros-backed nonprofit organizations and a political action committee that spend money on elections to support Democrats like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI ), Summer Lee (D-PA ), and Susan Wild (D-PA ), according to Federal Election Commission filings. Emgage collaborates on activities with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America, two unindicted co-conspirators in a situation involving violence funding in 2009.
Between 2021 and 2024, Emgage CEO Wa’el Alzayat, a former Obama State Department standard, visited the White House at least 24 days, according to White House guest files.
Some of those appointments included Biden, such as a meeting held on October 26 in the Roosevelt Room where five people were present. On February 2, Alzayat and Middle East National Security Council representative Brett McGurk met in person on the same day that over 800 American and European officials issued a statement criticizing European governments for supporting Israel. A request for comment was never received by the White House.
However, the Emgage CEO’s White House exposure is not unusual for the organization.
On Emgage’s site, the party touts how it has held regular conferences with the White House Presidential Personnel Office under Biden — an office “responsible for aiding the leader in recruiting, screening, and voting over 4, 000 political appointees throughout the federal government”.
Some individuals affiliated with Emgage have gone on to work in the Biden-Harris administration, including Emgage board member Farooq Mitha, who works in the Defense Department. Dilawar Syed, deputy administrator for the Small Business Administration, resigned from his Emgage board member role in 2021.
Iman Awad, Emgage’s deputy director and national legislative director, has visited the Biden White House 11 times, according to visitor logs.
Salima Suswell, a senior Emgage adviser who worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign, has visited the Biden White House six times. According to visitor logs, Suswell and five others met in the White House’s East Wing in April, and they also shared a space there.
According to a Washington Examiner review of visitor logs, policy analyst Hanna Dasoo, organizing director Mohamed Gula, organizers from Florida Zakir Shareef, Texas policy associate Niloufar Hafizi, senior adviser Debbie Almontaser, and others have been given White House visits.
Emgage has received millions of dollars over the years from Soros’s Open Society Foundations grantmaking network, despite not responding to a request for comment. It also gets checks from the Tides Foundation, a massive left-wing dark money group behind anti-Israel protests.
Iltefat Hamzavi, the Emgage Foundation’s board chairman, was also appointed in 2018 to the Islamic Society of North America’s board, tax records show.
Hamzavi served as president of the Muslim Observer, a newspaper that publishes antisemitic articles, including a 2014 article that claimed that” Israel controls almost every aspect of American life, from politics and government to the economy they invest in to the media they are exposed to.”
Additionally, the outlet published an article from 2014 by Holocaust deniers Kevin Barrett and Aslam Abdullah, a 2021 article in which he claimed that the United States supports Israel because both political parties have Christians as followers of Zionism and Israel.
Farrukh Shamsi, another Emgage board member, has shared antisemitic content online, such as the conspiracy theory that Jews control the White House. He also backed the theory that Israeli women were n’t the victims of massive rape in the attacks of October 7.
Richard Goldberg, a former member of the White House National Security Council who worked on the Iran portfolio, is concerned about Emgage’s access to the White House.
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” The extent to which pro-Hamas organizations have impacted the Biden-Harris administration is breathtaking and unsurprising,” said Goldberg, a senior adviser to the nonpartisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
Unsurprising when you consider the president’s and his senior advisors ‘ increasingly hostile policies and statements toward Israel in the last few months, Goldberg said.” Breathtaking that groups like this can sit with the president and his senior advisors,” Goldberg said.
