Briefly Noted: December 2014

National Action Network founder Al Sharpton played a significant role in President Obama’s selection of federal prosecutor Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as U.S. attorney general, according to various news reports. Lynch, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was first appointed by President Obama in 2010. She shares a lot of Sharpton’s radical left-wing views such as the belief that voter ID laws are racist. Lynch also belonged to the Harvard Black Law Students Association in the 1980s when she was a student. That radical group brought representatives from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to speak on campus, GotNews.com reports. BLSA leader Mohammed Kenyatta called for the “liberation of Palestine” and expressed support for the PLO.

Voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens is so prevalent throughout the nation that it gave us Obamacare, according to a study by two Old Dominion University political science professors. The new report by Jesse Richman and David Earnest “examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants,” a first in voting studies, they claim. “Non-citizen votes,” which are almost always illegal, “likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress,” the authors write. North of 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples reported being registered to vote. “Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010,” they wrote. And yet left-wing groups such as Demos, Brennan Center for Justice, Center for American Progress, and Advancement Project claim voter fraud is a myth.

The old Missouri chapter of now-defunct ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is playing at least a supporting role in the violent unrest and crime wave that has plagued Ferguson and St. Louis, Mo., since the Aug. 9 police shooting of Michael Brown. Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, is the rebranded Missouri branch of ACORN, the left-wing activist network that filed for bankruptcy in 2010. MORE has been active in the protests and in efforts to free jailed demonstrators so they can continue vandalizing businesses, intimidating perceived adversaries, setting fires, throwing projectiles and urine at cops, and engaging in the Left’s usual modes of so-called nonviolent protest. President Obama used to work for ACORN, and he represented it in court as a lawyer.

The government of the United Arab Emirates has designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a terrorist organization. Although CAIR claims to be “a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding” whose mission “is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding,” the U.S. government named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. That foundation was found guilty of aiding Hamas terrorists. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy calls CAIR a “Muslim Brotherhood bullhorn created to cheerlead for sharia, for Hamas, and for sundry other jihadists—all under the guise of ‘civil rights.’” Amazingly, the Obama administration refuses to designate CAIR a terrorist organization. CAIR was profiled in Organization Trends, August 2005.

Terrorist Rasmea Odeh, associate director of the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network (AAAN), was convicted last month by a Detroit jury of immigration fraud. Prosecutors accused Odeh of killing two Israelis in the Sixties and then lying about it in U.S. immigration papers. Odeh previously received a sentence of life imprisonment from Israel but was released after 10 years as part of a prisoner swap. AAAN receives funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Tides Foundation, and Woods Fund of Chicago.