The head of Turkey's state-run television service is openly urging Turks to donate to the campaign of Ilhan Omar, the anti-Semitic congresswoman from Minnesota. JNS has the story:

Wait a second...isn't foreign influence on our elections supposed to be a bad thing? Illegal, in fact?

Tarek Cherkaoui, the manager of the Turkish state-run news channel TRT World's research center, wrote an article in April calling upon Turks to donate to the campaign fund of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The article was widely reprinted in the Turkish media.

The article, written for the English-language website of the Turkish pro-government daily Yeni Şafak and published on April 1, 2019, was titled "Media Flak Directed At Ilhan Omar No Surprise At All." At least seven other Turkish media outlets ran the article, in both English and in Turkish.



Omar meets President Erdoğan in 2017 at U.N. (photo credit: MEMRI via JNS).

It is illegal for foreign nationals to donate to American political campaigns, but most of the readers of the article and its many reprints will be Turkish nationals.

In the article, Cherkaoui wrote that "donating money to Omar's campaign fund would be an adequate way of denying powerful organizations the power to censor alternative voices."

At a minimum, Omar should repudiate the idea of foreign nationals donating to her campaign, launch a screening campaign for donors who might be from Turkey, and insist that all the publications that published Cherkaoui's appeal inform their readers that donations from non-Americans to her campaign are illegal and will be returned.