Terror Group-supporting Congressman Attacks John Birch Society

During a TV interview about the growing scandal surrounding Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a liberal Republican congressman infamous for his close ties to a Soviet-backed terrorist group took a swipe at “elements” of the constitutionalist John Birch Society. Speaking on Fox News, Congressman Peter King (R-N.Y.; shown) called on Democrat Party leadership to condemn Representative Omar’s comments, which were widely slammed as anti-Semitic. But in the process, for reasons that were not immediately clear, King also invoked alleged Republican resistance against some elements of the JBS. He may have still been mad that a Jewish writer for this magazine — an affiliate of JBS — exposed his troubling links to the Nazi- and Islamist terror-linked Irish Republican Army (IRA).

The broader saga in question began when far-left Representative Omar, a Somalia-born Muslim credibly accused of perpetrating immigration fraud by marrying her brother, suggested on social media that members of Congress were being paid to support Israel. In particular, she pointed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobbying group that seeks to build support for the Jewish state among U.S. policymakers. The social-media posts sparked deafening bipartisan outrage and condemnation. Critics on both sides of the aisle suggested it was even anti-Semitic. President Donald Trump called on Omar to resign. But Democrat leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the GOP criticism, saying Republicans did not have “clean hands.”

That is when Representative King, one of the most liberal “Republicans” in America, took a swipe at The John Birch Society. Asked what was taking so long for the Democrat Party leadership to condemn Omar’s comments, King suggested they were too scared. “This is the resistance movement of the Democratic Party. It is their left-wing base. And they are providing a lot of the energy for the Democrats. So I think that the Democratic leadership is afraid to take them on. They are afraid to stand up to them,” King said on the Fox News show America’s Newsroom. “And just like years ago, conservatives had to stand up to elements of the John Birch Society, it is important now that the Democratic leadership come forward and denounce this wing of the party and people from it who carry on with this sort of anti-Semitic language.”

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The New American reached out to Representative King’s office to get clarification on his bizarre comments. However, no response was received by press time. First, we asked what he was trying to suggest by invoking JBS in his comments. If King was trying to imply in some way that the JBS was anti-Semitic, that would be ridiculous, of course — especially considering that the Society has included prominent Jewish leaders on its National Council, including Jewish business titan Alfred Kohlberg, who was one of the founding council members. In fact, from the beginning, membership in the Society has been closed to anti-Semites and all racists, with any who are discovered being expelled and banned from future membership.

Even official investigations have determined as much. The California Senate Fact-Finding Committee came to the obvious conclusion after its investigation that not only was the Society not racist or anti-Semitic, it specifically opposed racism and anti-Semitism. “There are many Jews on the Birch committees, many in the society; some members have been asked to resign because they were found to be disruptive with their anti-Semitic attitude,” the committee found, adding that JBS founder Robert Welch and various JBS coordinators were working with prominent Jewish groups to “squelch anti-Semitism.” The report also found “much evidence to the effect that [the JBS] opposes racism in all forms.”

Ironically, through his support for the historically anti-Semitic terror group IRA, King has much closer ties to anti-Semitism than almost anybody else in Congress. More on that soon.

Next, The New American asked King’s office to elaborate on his claims about people within the GOP having to supposedly “stand up” to “elements” of the Birch Society. Ironically, when the Rockefeller-establishment wing of the party tried to come down on the JBS, it blew up in their faces. During the 1964 election, globalist and liberal forces tried to have Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater condemn The John Birch Society as “extreme.” Instead, Goldwater, who was elected to the GOP nomination with strong JBS support and many JBS delegates, infamously proclaimed: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” That quote still resonates today.

As for the attacks by William Buckley on JBS Founder Robert Welch, those are hardly surprising. While the two men were initially friendly with each other, and Welch even helped Buckley get his magazine National Review off the ground, it soon became clear that Buckley was serving as a “pied piper for the establishment.” Among other concerns, Buckley was a member of the liberal-globalist Council on Foreign Relations and the death-obsessed secret society Skull and Bones that the Bush family and John Kerry are involved in. Buckley was also affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency. And his views were hardly “conservative” in the true sense of the term — he was a staunch advocate of Big Government, U.S. military intervention overseas, the United Nations, and more. Buckley also argued in his magazine that whites in the South, as the “more advanced race,” had a duty to prevent blacks from voting to preserve civilization from “Negro backwardness.”

The real reason for King’s swipe at the JBS could be that he was still upset about an article in this magazine exposing his blatant support for the bloody terrorist group known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Ironically, considering his comments, the article exposing King, who is a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, was written by Jewish writer Daniel Sayani of New York. In the piece, headlined “Pro-IRA Congressman Probes Terrorism,” Sayani noted that King had troubling ties to the infamous terrorist group, which itself was tied to the mass-murdering dictatorships ruling the Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany. Also ironically, despite his purported concern for terror, King has never publicly exposed the myriad ties between terror groups and Moscow — or Washington, D.C., for that matter.

“The well-documented links between Rep. King and the Irish Republican Army date back to 1982, when King was Nassau County Comptroller,” Sayani wrote. “King would make frequent trips to Northern Ireland and has spent 30 years of his political career stoutly defending the IRA and its often bloody methods. King was a vocal and frequent House champion for the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, and its leader, Gerry Adams, and was even banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views. King once called the IRA ‘the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland,’ and refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers.” King was also deeply involved with American groups that were supporting and funding the IRA. And a judge once threw him out of court, calling him “an obvious collaborator with the IRA.”

According to Sayani, King’s connections to a known terrorist group “cast doubts on his own true commitment to fighting terrorism.” Those ties also “raise suspicions as to whether Rep. King is truly knowledgeable of the extent of the dangerous connection between Islamists and various leftist groups.” And adding even more seriousness to these connections is that fact that the IRA is clearly tied to the Soviet Union, which utilized terror groups around the world to destabilize anti-communist governments and install communist dictators in power, Sayani observed. The group’s leadership even had a personal meeting with Joseph Stalin, one of history’s most savage mass murderers, who agreed to help fund and arm the IRA. Later, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi would help the IRA, too. Representative King, meanwhile, called the IRA “the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland” and a “legitimate force” that had to be recognized.

Perhaps even more ironically, considering the context of his anti-JBS smear, are the well-documented links between the IRA and anti-Semitism and even Hitler’s National Socialist regime. Writing in Real Clear World, historian Sean Gannon documented the ties between the IRA and various Middle Eastern terrorist groups. In the same article, Gannon also explored the IRA’s strident anti-Israel campaign and its long history of anti-Semitism dating back more than a century.

“The stridency of Irish Republicanism’s anti-Israel campaign has, unsurprisingly, given rise to accusations of anti-Semitism,” Gannon observed. “Certainly, the movement is tainted with an anti-Semitic past. Arthur Griffith, who founded the original Sinn Fein movement in 1905, used the pages of his newspaper to rail against ’Jew Swindledom’ (9/10ths of all Jews were, he proclaimed, ’usurers and parasites’) and the Dreyfusards. While similar prejudices were commonplace in all the political parties which descended from his organization, only the eponymous rump which remained after the splits of 1921 and 1926 habitually preached Jew-hatred, culminating in a demand for an Irish-German alliance in 1939.”

But it gets worse. “The ’new’ IRA, itself soaked in anti-Semitism, took a similar view and attempted to forge a working relationship with the Germans,” Gannon noted. “The death of its leader, Sean Russell, on a U-boat bound for Ireland on a mission sanctioned by Ribbentrop was an early blow to its hopes; he was buried at sea with full military honors, his body wrapped in a Nazi flag (Republicans still hold an annual commemoration service for him which senior Sinn Fein members have regularly addressed). That later efforts came to nothing was due, not to any lack of will on the IRA’s part, but to the chaotic state of the organization and the success of Irish intelligence in quelling subversion…. In the post-war period, anti-Jewish concerns continued to shape the worldview of many in the Republican movement.” The IRA’s official newspaper, the United Irishman, also regularly carried anti-Semitic rants.

Another article in this magazine that focused on Congressman King exposed his dishonest and nasty attacks against Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). While Paul was trying to defend constitutional privacy protections for Americans, King was spewing hatred and saying Paul did not deserve to be in the Senate due to his “absolute lies” about illegal NSA spying. “The NSA is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing,” King said. “No one’s privacy is being violated, despite what Senator Rand Paul is talking about. The NSA is not listening to Americans’ phone calls.” Of course, now everybody knows that the NSA was illegally collecting and storing the communications of Americans, as numerous whistleblowers have revealed. But King never apologized for his vicious remarks against Paul that were debunked in this magazine.

Aside from his hatred of Paul, who told this magazine in an interview that he just wants to see the U.S. Constitution enforced and the rights of Americans protected, King also loathes other lawmakers with more constitutional voting records. Speaking of Senator Ted Cruz, for instance, King could barely contain his seething, unhinged hatred. “I hate Ted Cruz, and I think I’ll take cyanide if he ever got the nomination,” he fumed. King admitted that he voted for John Kasich, widely viewed as a “Republican In Name Only” (RINO) among grassroots Republicans.

In the article debunking King’s claims against Paul, this magazine again highlighted King’s blatant ties to terrorism and terror organizations. “King was the Anwar al-Awlaki of Irish Republican Army terrorist supporters,” TNA observed. “King posed for pictures with IRA terrorist leaders and actively helped to fundraise for their most militant wing.”

In the 114th Congress, King was ranked by the The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy as the most “bipartisan” member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Said another way, King was the most willing collaborator with the Democrat Party in the expansion of government and the subversion of Americans’ God-given liberties. On this magazine’s “Freedom Index,” which Congressman Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) described as the nation’s “best scorecard by far,” King has a record of voting constitutionally just 46 percent of the time over his career. He is a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership, which is the most liberal and globalist wing of the party. He also voted for the Wall Street bailout. And he supports gun control, too. It was not really clear what distinguishes him from Democrats, actually.

If King’s office responds to The New American‘s questions, this article will be updated with his response.

Photo of Rep. Peter King: AP Images

Alex Newman is a contributor to The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.