EXCLUSIVE: Mike Pence’s Org Wants Salary of “Virulent Antisemite” Slashed to $1
Mike Pence's Advancing American Freedom (AAF) wants House Republicans to cut Maher Bitar's to just $1
As everyone who stayed awake during middle school civics knows, Congress has the power of the purse, and Mike Pence’s organization is asking House Republicans to leverage that power to slash the salary of a “virulent antisemite” to $1 a year in the upcoming appropriations bill.
At issue is Maher Bitar, who works as the Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council. He previously interned for the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which has faced bipartisan, withering fire for its extensively reported ties to Hamas in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attacks. Most prominently, an ever-growing number of UNRWA employees have been found to have participated in the terrorist attacks themselves.
One particularly heinous act was an UNRWA social worker kidnapping the body of Yonatan Samerano and taking it to Gaza. I spoke with Samerano’s mother, Ayelet, in Geneva at a conference hosted by UN Watch. While speaking there, she poignantly asked: “Does the UN hold my son?”
While you could theoretically chalk interning at UNRWA up to a youthful indiscretion, its extensive work promoting Jew-hatred via textbooks that would make Adolf Hitler green with envy, has been documented for decades.
As the Times of Israel reported:
Among the content that IMPACT-se flagged was a grammar exercise teaching that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” the statement said.
Other exercises include sentences about “Jihad warriors” against “the occupier,” commitment to “liberate” Palestine, and “resisting the enemy courageously,” according to the report.
A poem teaches students that to die as a martyr by killing Israelis is a “hobby.”
“The poem glorifies the rejection of a peaceful ceasefire during battle, presenting peace-making as a sign of weakness,” it said.
Islamic education material depicts Jews as “inherently treacherous, and hostile to Islam and Muslims,” including another grammar exercise implying that Jews are impure and defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.
“Israel is described as having been implanted by an imperialist, European, colonial, anti-Arab conspiracy with the goal of dividing the Arab world,” IMPACT-se said.
Israel is erased from the UNRWA material and the entire area of the Jewish state is labeled as modern-day Palestine. Students are given exercises of naming Israeli cities as Palestinian, it added.
Bitar also interned for the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), back in 2005. As Adam Kredo notes in the Washington Free Beacon:
The Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) [is] an anti-Israel advocacy organization that is deeply enmeshed in the BDS movement. FMEP routinely accuses Israel of "war crimes" and describes it as an "apartheid" state. The organization has provided grant money to a host of prominent BDS supporters and anti-Israel groups, including IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Churches for Middle East Peace.
Beyond his internships, Bitar was both a leader with Students for Justice in Palestine, a virulently anti-Semitic group, and was “credited with assembling a 2008 magazine published by the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, a group that backs BDS and supports the Palestinian ‘right of return,’ which would flood Israel with refugees from around the Middle East. In that publication, the authors discuss ‘Palestine's Ongoing Nakba,’ a term that refers to Israel's 1948 establishment as a ‘disaster,’” as Kredo also notes.
In his Georgetown University yearbook, Bitar is photographed in front of a poster that reads “Divest from Israeli Apartheid.”
Consequently, Paul Teller, the executive director of Pence’s Advancing American Freedom (AAF), wrote to Republicans in the House today, requesting that they “use the Holman Rule to cut funding for the salary of Maher Bitar in the upcoming appropriations bill.” Teller pulls no punches here, calling UNRWA a “terrorist organization that actively participated in the October 7th attack on Israel.”
In recent years, the Holman Rule has been revived by congressional Republicans as a way to scrutinize certain federal employees, like Bitar in this case. Congresswoman Claudia Tenney has tried to invoke the rule on other top GOP targets, like Alejandro Mayorkas and Karine Jean-Pierre, for example.
While most attempts to invoke the Holman Rule fall flat, Pence’s organization making it clear that “the American people will not stand idly by while the Biden Administration abuses their tax dollars to keep a virulent antisemite on the federal payroll” is a breath of fresh air compared to what we normally see from the White House these days.