In his bid for election as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison has staked out his ground in the Sanders/Warren socialist wing of the party. Let us concede this much. It’s a big wing.

No one will get to Ellison’s left in the contest for DNC chairman. Ellison has therefore announced his refusal to attend the inauguration of Donald Trump on Friday. The Star Tribune quotes Ellison saying on Monday that he will not “celebrate a man who preaches a politics of division and hate.”

Ellison has a funny idea of unity and love. Ellison spoke, for example, at a fundraiser in 2009 for Libya-born activist Esam Omeish, who was campaigning for election to the Virginia state assembly. Omeish once called on Palestinians to embrace “the jihad way” in order to get free of Israeli control. Chuck Ross reported at the Daily Caller that Omeish had also praised one of the founders of Hamas and commended the work of Palestinian suicide bombers.

That should be no surprise. Omeish was the past president of the Muslim American Society, the Muslim Brotherhood front group.

But wait! There’s more. At the fundraiser Ellison met with Hamas fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti. Patrick Poole picks up this piece of the story here. Poole notes that pictures posted to Flickr by Omeish show Ellision and al-Hanooti chatting at the event (one is below).

Poole also notes that al-Hanooti “holds the rare distinction of not only being named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-finance case in American history, but also of being listed as a conspirator in the trial of ‘Blind Sheik’ Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned follow-up attack on New York City landmarks. FBI agents have also testified that al-Hanooti was a participant in an infamous 1993 meeting in Philadelphia of senior Hamas leaders in the U.S.”

Readers who get their news from the Star Tribune will have little idea of the meaning of Ellison’s friends and enemies. The Star Tribune missed the story almost entirely when Ellison first sought the Democratic nomination for his current seat in 2006. Even though it’s not too late to get the story right now that Ellison has reemerged as a national figure, the Star Tribune would prefer not to.