Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) will be the keynote speaker at a fundraiser for the Los Angeles branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on March 23.

As Breitbart news has noted:

In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeled CAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).

The political action committee of CAIR in California donated the maximum of $5,000 to Omar’s 2018 campaign.

The event will be held in the San Fernando Valley community of Woodland Hills, and comes on the heels of Omar’s controversial remarks about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), alleging that the organization had paid members of Congress to support Israel. AIPAC does not donate to candidates.

Democrat leaders condemned Omar’s remarks as antisemitic, and she apologized — but did not take down the offending tweets.

CAIR issued a statement defending Omar in the controversy:

Anti-Semitism is real, and real anti-Semites pose a serious threat to our Jewish neighbors.

That’s why politicians must stop disingenuously using accusations of anti-Semitism to silence legitimate criticism of a foreign nation’s discriminatory policies. We applaud Congresswoman Ilhan Omar & Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and others for courageously speaking the truth about the Israeli government’s policies of racial, religious and ethnic segregation against Christian and Muslim Palestinians, among others. Criticizing Israeli government policies–and the lobby groups which advocate for those policies on Capitol Hill, like AIPAC–is not anti-Semitic, just as criticizing Saudi government policies–and the lobby groups which advocate for those policies on Capitol Hill–is not Islamophobic.

In 2015, CAIR’s Los Angeles director suggested that the U.S. was partly to blame for the San Bernardino terror attack, in which 14 people were killed, due to American foreign policy. CAIR also offered legal assistance to the family of the terrorists who carried out the attack.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.