During a 2008 trip to Saudi Arabia, Rep. Keith Ellison (D., Minn.) met with a radical Muslim cleric who endorsed killing U.S. soldiers. He also met with the president of a bank used to pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Those are the meetings we found out about.

Ellison’s two-week trip to Saudi Arabia in 2008 was funded by a Muslim Brotherhood front group – the Muslim American Society or MAS.

The Washington Free Beacon obtained photos of Ellison meeting with the terrorists. Ellison is the leading contender for the position of Democratic National Committee chair because this is who they are now and they’re apparently not going back to center.

The left likes to distract from the fact that they have embraced radical Islamists, Communists, Socialists, criminals like George Soros by calling attention to GOP donors like the Koch brothers and irrelevant extremists on the right like Richard Spencer’s group who have no influence whatsoever in the Republican Party. Their extremists, on the other hand, are very influential.

A photo album of Ellison’s hajj trip posted by MAS’s Minnesota chapter includes a picture of the congressman meeting with Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah, who was vice president of a Muslim Brotherhood-created group that in 2004 issued a fatwa urging “jihad” against U.S. troops in Iraq and supported the Palestinians’ Second Intifada against Israel.

“The Jihad-waging Iraqi people’s resistance to the foreign occupation … is a Shari’a duty incumbent upon anyone belonging to the Muslim nation,” the fatwa said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Bin Bayyah’s group, the International Association of Muslim Scholars, issued the fatwa after a conference in Beirut, Lebanon.

The group was founded by Yusuf Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader who was banned from visiting the United States because of his calls to kill Jews and Americans.

Bin Biyyah issued an additional fatwa in 2009, shortly after his meeting with Ellison, “barring all forms of normalization with Israel.”

Ellison also took time on his trip to meet with Dr. Ahmad Mohamed Ali, the president of a Saudi Arabia-based bank that funnels millions of dollars to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel.

Ali’s bank, the Islamic Development Bank, maintains the Al-Quds Intifada Fund and the Al-Aqsa Fund, which were established in 2000 to fund Palestinian terrorism and provide money to the families of Palestinian “martyrs.” The funds were established with an initial investment of $200 million.

Ali said his bank—which is referred to as the “Bank of the Intifada” by Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust—is responsible “for the smooth functioning of the two funds” and that there is “no delay” in paying families of “martyrs.”

“There was no delay in paying financial assistance to the families of Palestinian martyrs,” Ali said in 2001. “We have started paying them soon after receiving the money.”

Ellison does not respond when his office is queried. That approach seems to work for him. When the NY Times was ready to interview him a couple weeks ago, they were prepared to ask him about prior associations and employment with Louis Farrakhan but when he found out, he canceled the interview. The Times noted it at towards the end of an article but failed to follow up.

Ellison told congressional investigators on the House Ethics Committee that he did not have any “meetings of an official nature” on his trip and “instead undertook only the more personal itinerary scheduled by the Muslim American Society.”

He attended a whole bunch of meetings. Please read the story at the Washington Free Beacon.

He’s a liar and in addition to being a liar he’s a racist.

He has been, as an adult, an avid supporter and employee of crazy racist Louis Farrkhan who calls himself a man of God while spewing hate.