Posted by
J-GOP on Friday, June 20, 2008 2:17:32 PM
This article come from the June 23rd edition of FrontPageMag.com:
Forty-eight-year-old Rima Barakat-Sinclair has been a resident of Denver since 1987. Never having held political office before, she is currently running as a Republican for a State House seat in Colorado’s Sixth District, which is heavily Democratic and features the largest per capita Jewish population in the state. With the self-identified aim of working “for better understanding among peoples of different backgrounds,” Barakat-Sinclair has participated in numerous “interfaith dialogues” to promote “more tolerance” and thereby create “a stronger united America.” She pledges undying allegiance to such ideals as “upholding the Constitution,” defending “individual freedom,” promoting “small government,” enacting “prudent tax and spending policies,” “investing in our children,” guaranteeing “freedom of religion,” and recognizing “the sanctity of human life.” Oh, and by the way, she is a Muslim activist who considers Israel to be a nation of bloodthirsty monsters who indiscriminately murder innocent Palestinian women and children for no reason other than to satisfy their own beastly compulsions.
While working as a contract translator for CNN in 2003, Mrs. Barakat-Sinclair was part of an interfaith delegation of Christians and Muslims who paid a friendly visit to Yasser Arafat at his Ramallah headquarters, where, since December 2001, Israeli troops had been keeping him under virtual house arrest in an effort to derail his terrorist activities. Favorably impressed by the most prolific Jew-killer since Adolph Hitler, Barakat-Sinclair would later reflect: “I know the accusations about him [Arafat] supporting terror, but he was so confined and surrounded that to me it seemed more like visiting a tourist attraction than visiting a head of state. It was very, very weird.” Arafat’s main message to his visitors, she expanded, was that he felt “robbed of his legacy” because “the peace process had not gone forward.” Added the star-struck woman, “He [Arafat] flirted [with me] a bit, in a very nice way, you know, saying, ‘I like your hair, your long braids.’”
Barakat-Sinclair was a key participant in an October 2005 conference sponsored by Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based organization that supports a “one-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict, where Israel would continue to exist, but not as a Jewish state. Barakat-Sinclair led a workshop on the topic of the so-called “Right of Return” of those Palestinian refugees who (for the most part) voluntarily had left the region during the 1948 Arab invasion of Israel. At that time, the refugees sought out safe haven during what they anticipated would be a brief war that the Arab allies undoubtedly would win, and they fully expected to return to their homes within a few weeks -- once the fighting had stopped and the Jews had been crushed. Instead, the Arab armies were defeated. Barakat-Sinclair now calls for the re-admittance not only of the relatively few surviving people who were among those 725,000 original refugees, but also for the admittance of several millions of their descendants, a move that would transform Israel overnight into an Arab-majority state dominated by Muslims sympathetic with the aims of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In a July 2006 interview with CBS television, Barakat-Sinclair stood truth on its head when she condemned Israel’s “imprisonment of five million Palestinians” who, for their part, were “trying to resolve this conflict peacefully.” Israel had responded to those peace efforts, she said, by engaging in “more and more land-grabbing,” by erecting a wall “literally imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people,” and by incarcerating more than “ten thousand prisoners,” including women and children, “for no reason.” “Israeli soldiers now are known to be just bombing and killing babies,” she added for good measure. (Click here for video of this interview.)
Four months later, Barakat-Sinclair charged that a “depraved” Israel routinely carried out “massacres” by means of “the regular use of disproportionate firepower against a trapped population in Gaza” -- thereby demonstrating “the level of contempt with which the Israel government views Palestinian lives.” She told tales of sadistic Israeli soldiers beating handicapped people, gunning down women and babies, opening fire on crowds of beachgoers, breaking into homes at night and murdering entire families in their beds, and riddling children with bullets while the youngsters were merely harvesting strawberries. Likening Israel’s “mass slaughter” of Palestinians to the horrors that existed under “slavery, [South African] apartheid and Nazi concentration camps,” Barakat-Sinclair said that Israel “has turned back the clock to the time of the barbarians” by engaging in “the systematic indiscriminate murder of civilians and the illegal collective imprisonment of a whole nation.”
“As Americans we must understand that the world sees the United States as a collaborator in this endless carnage,” says Barakat-Sinclair. “The F-16s that drop Israeli death decrees upon the Palestinians were ‘Made in the USA.’ We finance and enable the perpetrators to commit these crimes with impunity and in violation of our own laws.”
Just as Barakat-Sinclair places no limits on the lies she is willing to tell about Israel, so is she prepared to go to any lengths to avoid criticizing Islamic terrorists. Indeed she has claimed, on the air, that the Hamas Charter does not in any way call for Israel’s destruction. Yet that document decrees quite plainly, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” The Charter further contains numerous calls for violent jihad to counter “the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine.”
Barakat-Sinclair also has defended Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi against his critics, calling him “a renowned Muslim scholar.” A disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Islam expert Robert Spencer describes as “the parent organization of Hamas and al Qaeda,” Qaradawi is a supporter of Palestinian terrorism who has been barred from entering the United States since 1999.
Barakat-Sinclair is a member of the Steering Committee of Muslims Intent on Learning and Action (MILA), an organization that seeks to increase Muslims’ involvement in the American political process. Her own current candidacy is a reflection of that mission.
To pass herself off as a conservative Republican, Barakat-Sinclair has had to resort to considerable deception. For instance, she falsely represented herself at the District Assembly as a pro-life opponent of abortion. Her duplicity on this issue eventually would come to light, however, when a researcher tracked down a quote where Barakat-Sinclair had told the Rocky Mountain News on August 14, 2004: “I would like to have a president who is pro-choice.”
Barakat-Sinclair’s opponent in the upcoming Republican primary (slated for August 12th) will be Joshua Sharf, a contract web developer whose professional career also has included work as a talk radio host, a financial analyst, and a defense and intelligence consultant for such projects as satellite systems and missile defense. In 2004 and 2005 Sharf served as an election judge, and in 2006 he was a delegate to the Colorado Republican state assembly. A blogger at his own View From a Height website and at Brent Bozell’s Newsbusters, Sharf is running as a traditional conservative Republican, and not, despite the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of the district, as an identity candidate.
Sharf has accurately characterized Barakat-Sinclair as “a terror apologist, and an avowed enemy of Israel, with no credible conservative credentials.” “When engaged in anti-Israel propaganda,” Sharf observes, she usually goes by [the name] Rima Barakat. When engaged in broader political work, she goes by Rima Sinclair …”
Taking a page directly out of the leftist playbook, Barakat-Sinclair has cast herself as a victim, dismissing Sharf’s criticisms of her affinity for Islamic extremism as evidence of her opponent’s Islamophobic bigotry. Complaining that “these attacks on me have intense emotions of hate and militancy behind them,” she laments that her detractors “hate my religion, my very being.”
In an effort to gain favorable press coverage for her political campaign, Barakat-Sinclair has turned to the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, a project of the Council for the National Interest (CNI). CNI’s stated mission is “to restore a political environment in America in which voters and their elected officials are free from the undue influence and pressure of a foreign country, namely Israel.” Specifically, the organization calls for: “total withdrawal of Israel from all occupied territory”; “an end to all acts of aggression, provocation, and retaliation by Israel”; “American recognition of a totally independent state of Palestine”; and “an elimination of all unaudited U.S. aid to Israel.” In short, CNI is no friend of Israel.
Barakat-Sinclair’s case is vitally important because it offers a vivid illustration of how a Muslim radical can effectively wage bloodless jihadagainst the West by infiltrating the government and thereby gaining a platform from which to infect the entire body politic. Her strategy is wholly consistent with the plans that were laid out in a secret 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum on “the General Strategic Goal … in North America.” Explaining that the Brotherhood’s mission was to establish “an effective and ... stable Islamic Movement” on the continent, this document outlines a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” for achieving that objective. It states that Muslims “must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands ... so that ... God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.’”
Rima Barakat-Sinclair is the living embodiment of that strategy.