Discover the Networks
Tim Kaine: Leftist and Connections to Islamists
Born into an Irish Catholic family in Saint Paul, Minnesota on February 26, 1958, Timothy Kaine earned a BA from the University of Missouri in 1979 and a JD from the Harvard University School of Law in 1983. He subsequently practiced law for 17 years, representing people who claimed to have been denied housing opportunities based on race or disability. Kaine also spent time as a professor of legal ethics at the University of Richmond School of Law, and superintendent of a Technical School in Honduras. He launched his political career in the mid-1990s, serving as a member of the Richmond (Virginia) City Council (1995-98); Mayor of Richmond (1998-2001); Lieutenant Governor of Virginia (2002-06); Governor of Virginia (2006-10); and U.S. Senator from Virginia (2013-present). On July 22, 2016, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton named Kaine as her vice presidential running mate.
Kaine was involved in controversy related to a 1985 incident where University of Virginia student Jens Soering, a German citizen, brutally murdered the parents of a girl he was dating. Three years later, Kaine provided a sworn affidavit in support of Soering’s attempt to avoid extradition from England, to where the killer had fled following his crime. Soering was delivered to Virginia only after authorities agreed to reduce his capital murder charges and thereby eliminate any possibility of the death penalty, and in 1990 he was convicted and sentenced to two life terms in prison. Just before leaving office as governor in 2010, Kaine asked the U.S. Justice Department to transfer Soering to a German prison, where he would have been eligible for release within two years. The Justice Department denied the request. When he was subsequently asked about this matter in a debate during his 2012 Senate campaign, Kaine cited financial considerations: “I did feel like Virginians have paid for his incarceration for a very long time—let the Germans pay to keep this guy.”
Over the course of his political career, Kaine has developed close ties to numerous Islamists:
- In 2005, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Muslim American Society (MAS)supported Kaine in his race for governor of Virginia against Republican Jerry Kilgore.
- In his role as governor in 2007, Kaine appointed MAS president Esam Omeish to Virginia’s Immigration Commission. Omeish had previously served as president of the National Muslim Students Association; a board member of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); a board member of the Islamic American University; board chairman of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, a New Jersey mosque with deep terrorist ties and an imam with links to Hamas; and vice president and board member of Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, a radical mosque in Virginia whose imams have included Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awlaki and suicide-bombing supporterShaker Elsayed, and whose worshippers have included two 9/11 hijackers and the murderous “Fort Hood shooter” Nidal Hasan. Prior to his appointment by Kaine, Omeish also had described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” organization, had praised a former Hamas spiritual leader as “our beloved Sheikh Ahmed Yassin,” and had pledged to help Palestinians who understood that “the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.” As more information about Omeish’s radical Islamist ties became known, Kaine bowed to pressure and accepted his resignation.
- In May 2007 Kaine was the keynote speaker at the MAS Freedom Foundation’s “Standing for Justice Dinner.”
- In 2010 Kaine agreed to attend the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center’s annual banquet.
- In September 2011, Kaine spoke at an event presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award to U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Barzinji, closely associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). According to the Clarion Project: “Barzinji’s organization, IIIT, donated $10,000 in 2011 to the New Dominion PAC, the organization that held the event honoring Barzinji that Kaine spoke at. The Barzinji-tied New Dominion PAC donated $43,050 to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign between 2003 and 2005.” Kaine’s Senate campaign in 2011-2012 also received $4,300 from officials of ISNA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and another $3,500 from IIIT’s president-of-finance, Hisham Al-Talib.
- On September 25, 2011 in northern Virginia, then-U.S. Senate candidate Kainespoke at a “Candidates Night” which was held annually by the Arab American Institute.
- In 2012 a leaked secret memo detailing the agenda of the newly created National Muslim Democratic Council (NMDC), which exhorts Muslims to vote forDemocratic political candidates, specifically identified Kaine as one of the candidates it hoped to help elect. The NMDC document was signed by such notables as Basim Elkarra, executive director of CAIR’s Sacramento Valley Chapter, andLinda Sarsour of the Arab American Association of New York.
- In February 2016 Kaine attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the expansion of a worship center at the Virginia-based All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), whose executive imam was former ISNA president Mohamed Magid. Five months later, Kaine participated in a meeting sponsored by ADAMS.
In 2012 the New Virginia Majority, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization front group that seeks to effect “the progressive transformation of Virginia,” supported Kaine’s bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Other supporters included the Council for a Livable World and J Street, the latter of which endorsed and funded Kaine also in his “off-cycle” years of 2014 and 2016.
In early 2015, Kaine objected strenuously when Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress about the gravity of the growing Iranian nuclear threat and his “profound disagreement” with the negotiated deal that the Obama Administration was pursuing with Iran. Kaine joined seven other Senate Democrats in boycotting Netanyahu’s speech. That summer, Kaine declared himself a “strong supporter” of the final agreement, which would allow the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. (For additional details about the accord, click here.)
In May 2015, Kaine was one of 14 U.S. senators who wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to allow 65,000 people from war-torn, terrorism-ravaged Syria into the United States as refugees, despite many people’s concern that terrorists could potentially infiltrate the refugee program. The other signatories included Senators Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Mazie Hirono, Amy Klobuchar, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Robert Menendez, Patty Murray, Jeanne Shaheen, and Sheldon Whitehouse, and
Later that same year, Kaine opposed a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would have required more careful vetting of Syrians and Iraqis before they could be admitted to the United States as refugees. “These refugees are people who are terrorized, not terrorists,” Kaine said in a November 2015 interview wherein he claimed that “the refugee vetting process is one of the safest areas that we have.” In a speech on the Senate floor the following month, Kaine said: “I look at this refugee crisis as a test … about whether we, like [the biblical] Job, will be true to our principles or whether we’ll abandon them.” He also urged his fellow legislators to emulate the example of the 17th-century “Indians down near Jamestown Island” who had helped starving English settlers to survive by offering “an extension of a hand to strangers in a strange land.”
In 2015 as well, Kaine was a co-sponsor of S 299, the Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act of 2015, which sought to allow U.S. citizens to engage in unrestricted travel to Cuba for the first time since 1963.
Kaine ranks among the most left-wing political figures in the United States today. He is the only person with a 0% Lifetime Rating from the American Conservative Union (ACU), which has graded Members of Congress based on their votes on issues important to conservatives each year since 1971. Similarly, ConservativeReview.com gives Kaine a 0%rating.
Kaine strongly favors: government-enforced affirmative-action policies designed to compensate nonwhites and women for the effects of past and present discrimination; a steeply progressive income-tax structure where high earners pay disproportionately high rates; the implementation of a pathway-to-citizenship for illegal aliens; and the use of federal funds and direct federal job creation to help the U.S. economy recover from recession. Moreover, Kaine believes that Voter ID laws make it unnecessarily difficult for people to vote in political elections; that campaign finance reforms should be instituted to reduce the influence of money in elections; that the principle of separation-of-church-and-state makes school prayer, government funding for religious organizations, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places impermissible; that the use of vouchers for school choice constitutes bad public policy; and that the nationalization of banks and corporations is more appropriate than government bailouts of those entities when they fail economically.
SOURCE: DISCOVER THE NETWORKS