Vice President Kamala Harris has named Nasrina Bargzie as her liaison to Muslim and Arab voters, despite Bargzie’s record battling pro-Israel and Jewish students, and the fact that she was reportedly questioned by law enforcement after 9/11.
NBC News reported on Tuesday:
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is hiring Nasrina Bargzie to lead outreach to Muslim and Arab voters, according to a campaign official who first shared details of the plan with NBC News — a move focused on a key constituency that soured on President Joe Biden over his support of Israel.
Bargzie worked in Harris’ White House office until July as a policy adviser on Muslim, Arab and Gaza-related issues, as well as reproductive rights, voting and democracy, the campaign official said. She will cover the same broad portfolio on the campaign.
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Bargzie will focus on talking to Muslim and Arab communities as voters wait to see whether Harris will lay out a different approach to the Middle East and Israel from Biden’s.
Bargzie’s family came to the U.S. as refugees from Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. Her views are so radical that, Daniel Greenfield of FrontPageMag reports, friends warned law enforcement about her, and she was questioned after 9/11:
After 9/11, Nasrina Bargzie, an Afghan Muslim immigrant, was interviewed by law enforcement over troubling comments on the War on Terror reported by her friends.
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In 2001, while attending college, she was interrogated by the FBI about comments she had made to her friends. It’s unknown what she said, but it was enough to scare her friends, in one of the most liberal parts of the country, to apparently report her to law enforcement.
Bargzie also was an advocate for the Palestinian cause on campus at the University of California Berkeley, and pushed back against Jewish students who claimed that radical anti-Israel rhetoric on campus was a form of antisemitism.
Greenfield noted:
Nasrina Bargzie accused Jewish students and organizations of “organized legal bullying” for suing universities. She ridiculed the idea that calling for the destruction of Israel was “threatening” and co-signed a petition claiming that the lawsuit by Jewish students was “threatening” the speech of Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine and the Berkeley Muslim Students Association.
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Nasrina Bargzie was so desperate that she presented a request to the UN Human Rights Commission, a group often stocked with Islamic terrorist states, to intervene and stop the Department of Education from investigating “allegations of anti-Semitism on several campuses”.
Later, as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Bargize argued that U.S. Marines should be charged with murder over the deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq (one was convicted of negligent dereliction of duty).
In a 2015 article, Bargzie dismissed the concerns of Jewish students who said that extreme anti-Israel rhetoric, such as “mock checkpoints” at which students were stopped on campus, was threatening them and violating their civil rights. Bargzie, dismissing the rhetoric as mere “criticism” of Israel, wrote that investigating antisemitism on campus had a “stigma and chilling effect” on “on Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian community members.”
Bargzie was less concerned with the “stigma and chilling effect” on Jewish students of “mock eviction notices” being placed in dormitories by pro-Palestinian students, supposedly criticizing Israel’s policies in Palestinian areas. She described the suspension of the group responsible, Students for Justice in Palestine at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, as a form of censorship, noting that the ACLU had helped push for the group to be reinstated.
Bargzie who was Harris’s deputy counsel, is apparently very close to the vice president.
Bargzie’s appointment comes a day after Kamala Harris named Ilan Goldenberg, an Obama and Biden administration official who has helped lead the effort to sanction Israelis during wartime, as her liaison to Jewish communities.
These two appointments suggest that Harris is not only more pro-Palestinian than Biden, but could bring about a radical anti-Israel shift in U.S. policy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
