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March 27, 2019 - Know More News - Adam Green
14:51
American/Palestinian Ammar Campa-Najjar For Congress
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Hello, I'm Adam Green with No More News.
It's March 26, 2019, and I owe Amar Kampa Najar a huge apology.
Amar is running for Congress in California.
And yesterday I put out a video falsely saying that he is working with the Israeli lobby APEC.
Since then he has responded and we got everything cleared up, and he has a perfectly good explanation for why he stopped by but did not participate in the APEC event.
And he responded here on Twitter after I uh I saw this magazine.
What happened was is I saw this Jewish Jewish journal, San Diego Jewish Journal magazine reporting about the APEC dinner that they had recently, and one of the names on there of local politicians attending was Amar.
So I took photos, I tweeted it, I asked what that was about, and then there was a misundera very unfortunate misunderstanding that Amar thought that I was trolling him, like so many of these uh these Zionists that call him a terrorist do.
So he blocked me, but he he quickly unblocked and cleared everything up, and I really feel awful.
The stuff that I said must have been so hurtful and painful for him to hear.
Now that I've uh learned some more about him and which I'll get into here in a second.
So Amar says, uh Adam, honestly, thought you were another troll calling me a terrorist.
I'm sure you've seen those.
I absolutely have.
I'll get into that more in a second.
And um he says, I didn't go donate to Apex.
He's not an Apex not donating to him.
He's not rubbing shoulders or participating in the event.
He went there strictly for one reason, and that was to meet with journalist Ronan Bergman, who is at the San Diego Apex conference.
He wrote a book about how Amar's grandfather father wasn't a terrorist mastermind of the Munich hostages.
He had valuable info that would allow Amar to push back against Duncan Hunter, who that's the Republican guy that he's running against, his attacks.
So all through the election, they claimed Amar was a terrorist, they said his family was a terrorist, they said he had dual loyalty.
And notice that nobody freaked out about this dual loyalty trope, as they call it, as everybody did with Ilhan Omar.
And then I said, Thank you for responding.
Unfortunate misunderstanding.
Please DM me to discuss my retraction that I'm giving now.
I'm retracting uh all that I said about Amar yesterday.
Uh, he's not rubbing shoulders, he's not betraying his uh his Palestinian heritage, any of that stuff, and I am extremely sorry for saying all that.
It must have been incredibly hurtful.
And if I would have known this information before, I would have uh really thought twice that Apex would be working with this guy to begin with.
This is his uh op-ed or just his article that Amar wrote in the Washington Post.
I'm a Hispanic Arab American and Trump's election doesn't shake my belief in America.
Listen to some of this stuff.
So he says, I spent my early years with my family under siege by American-made helicopters and F-16s that leveled entire buildings on the block where he lived in Gaza in Palestine, which is under attack, uh huge attacks this week and in the last few years.
And then just as surreal, he sent spent the second part of his life working for the US government under the Obama administration, entrusted with serving the American public.
It's not a perfect love story, but he has witnessed in his life nothing short of an American miracle.
He says that his mother wept when he was nine years old living in Gaza when his grandma flew from San Diego all the way to Tel Aviv in Israel, the airport, to only to be turned away.
The second intifada, which he lived through, was a brutal war between Israel and the Palestinian people, and it broke out right before that his grandma landed.
His father, Yasser Najar, saw both his parents gunned down right in front of him when he was only 11 years old.
And then his uh Amar's father was orphaned and moved across Egypt and eventually making it to America.
He chose America and America chose him in 1986.
He met a uh Amar's mother, they got married, and then they relocated to the Middle East for a few years so that Amar's father could help Yasser Arafat lead a secular unity government.
And today Baba, as he's called, is a law abiding tax paying American Muslim who has devoted his life to promoting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.
And now we have this is uh something that Amar sent me.
This is a MPR interview from two thousand three with Amar's father discussing discussing the the murder of his parents right in front of him as a child and his uh his uh desire for peace in the in the Middle East.
So I'll play it play that.
Nearly every Palestinian and Israeli family has lost someone to the decades of violence between the two peoples.
Yasser Najar is a Palestinian authority official who saw his parents gunned down by Israeli commanders when he was just eleven.
Thirty years later, Najar has become a passionate advocate of peace, and PR Slinda Gradstein met him at his office in Gaza.
Yasser Najar remembers that April night in Beirut in nineteen seventy-three as if it were yesterday.
It was like any Hollywood movie.
We lived in a small apartment, 150 square meter, three bedroom apartment.
I was eleven, um the youngest of uh six brothers and sisters.
One o'clock after midnight, uh bomb blew off the door, and between ten and twelve commanders, you know, professional Israeli commanders rushed into the apartment and uh they were shooting everywhere.
Najar says his father fired a few shots from his pistol, but was soon overwhelmed.
While they were spraying him with the bullets, my mother came and she tried to defend him, so she stood in front of him, which was in really in vain because he already had some bullets, but he was still standing and trying to to push with his hands.
The whole thing took uh maybe three or four minutes.
Najar's father was a senior official in Yasser Arafat's Feta movement, and though his family didn't know it, he was also a leader of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group that murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the nineteen seventy-two Olympics in Munich.
The Israeli commando squad that gunned down the elder Najar and two other senior Palestinian officials to avenge the Munich massacre was led by Ehud Barak, who would later become Israel's prime minister.
While he declined to be interviewed for this report, Barak has described the Beirut operation to Israeli media, saying he and his squad snuck into the Lebanese capital wearing women's clothes.
After his father's assassination, Yasser Najar was adopted by the king of Morocco and sent to Egypt, where he was raised by his grandmother.
In nineteen eighty-one, he moved to San Diego, where he earned an MBA and later opened three clothing boutiques.
In nineteen ninety-four, when the Palestinian Authority was created and Yasser Arafat returned to Gaza, Najar followed him.
He says he wanted to fulfill his father's dream of returning to Palestine.
Today Najar is the head of the European division and the Palestinian Authorities Ministry of Planning and Cooperation.
Married with four children, Najar says he spent years hating Israel.
But now he says he's looking to the future.
I can hate the Israelis or Barak forever, you know.
And I'm in title too.
He took everything from me, my mother and my father.
But at the end, for my children to live, I have to put my hatred aside.
If I carry this hatred, my children will kill and end up being killed.
And as a father, I don't want that.
Najar's parents were both Palestinian refugees, who he says, were forced from their homes during the nineteen forty-eight war and the subsequent creation of Israel.
His father was from Yavne, a town south of Tel Aviv, and his mother from Jaffa.
Yasser Najjar says he's ready to give up the dream of returning to his ancestral home, provided there is a real peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
At the end, if I get back most of my claim, Gaza and the West Bank, and maybe the right to go visit the island and to take my children, tell them this is where your grandfather was born and lived, and your great-grandfather was buried.
Najar was involved in negotiations on economic cooperation with Israel during the nineteen nineties.
And although those talks have long since collapsed in the face of the latest round of bloodletting, Najar says both peoples have lost too much.
And it's time to build a future together.
I've lived in nine countries, and I visited so many countries I can't remember how many.
Palestine and Israel.
This area is the most beautiful on earth.
Every year we are not building this country together.
I mean, this is running up aside.
Every day we lose in conflict.
It's a loss to us on to our children.
Linda Gradstein in PR News.
Linda Gradstein, interview with Amar's father.
Very, very heartbreaking.
It really makes me feel awful that I accused him of betraying his Palestinian heritage yesterday, thinking that he was uh rubbing elbows with APEC.
So my sincere apologies to everybody.
And I hope nobody uh holds this, holds this against him.
None of his uh uh Arab Palestinian support.
So, anywho, um, and it's just so ironic that the person that he's working for, Duncan Hunter, is an extreme pro-Israel Zionist.
And I will do more videos uh covering Duncan.
And also Ehud Barak, I've covered him before and talked about him.
Ehud Barak was instrumental in uh pushing for the war on terror, and him and Netanyahu belong to the secret covert ops team going back decades that was involved with this, and many believe they're still working together behind the scenes.
I've covered it before, and I'll continue to cover Ehud Barak uh in the future.
So this that interview, you know, in one more from this Washington Post article from Amar, he says, I vowed to never show weakness or let her see me cry.
So I didn't cry when we said goodbye to our family in San Diego to live in the Palestinian territories for a few years.
I didn't cry when I watched my boy age Mohammed Aldura get shot and killed while hiding in a barrel.
I didn't cry the night they cut off the electricity to all of Gaza City, and my mom, stepmom, dad, and younger brothers hid in the dark corner of a cold kitchen floor as they carpet bombed our neighborhood, which is happening right now this week, by the way.
Gaza is just under under fire, extreme attack right now.
And I didn't cry when we had to leave Baba behind and finally return to the United States in August 2001.
That reading this almost made me cry knowing what I did yesterday, uh, accusing him of uh of working with APEC.
His which is why I took down the me the video immediately.
I'm doing this retraction.
I took down all the tweets I did about it.
I responded to everybody that retweeted it to set the record straight.
Please guys help me spread this around to uh exonerate uh Amar.
The only reason he stopped by APEC was to talk with the one journalist who would help exonerate and clear his name so that when he runs again in 2020 against Duncan Hunter, who's under all types of campaign violation, he won't be able, they won't be able to use this slander of claiming he's a terrorist that wants to uh uh attack America, infiltrate America.
So here's how the Washington Post article ends.
After not being considered Arab enough in Gaza, Latino enough for the barrio, or American enough and American enough in my own country, after so many shut doors, the doors to all others finally opened.
On that day in those hollowed halls, I cried the pain was given purpose to live to tell you this story and to give others hope.
So I just feel absolutely awful for doing that the other day.
And my sincerest apologies.
The guy that he's running against is uh under his father held the seat before him.
They've had this for almost uh four thirty-eight years.
This family has held this seat and uh been involved with the armed services committee.
And uh Hunter to cut short Israel trip repay campaign funds.
All San Diego constituents wonder what is your representative doing in Israel in all of these campaign violation fund uh campaign fund violations that he's under.
He had to get pulled from all his committees real quick.
Uh his open secrets, you can see here, he's paid by all the military industrial complex, pushing for more wars for Israel.
Here, BAE was one of his top donors.
BAE Systems, one of the top uh defense contractors, military contractors in the world.
You see here their website, BAE Systems, the Silver Bullet Precision Guidance Kit.
Silver Bullet System.
BAE Systems and the Government of Israel's are working in close collaboration with the Israeli defense forces.
The development work is being performed in the office in Jerusalem.
I imagine that is why Duncan Hunter is traveling to Israel and on the Armed Services Committee.
And he is under FBI investigation, all types of criminal conduct, been report of uh alcohol abuse, extramarital affairs.
And he he barely won.
He barely won.
And if there's going to be a rematch in 2020, Amar Kampa Nahar is running again despite racist attacks in the midterms.
They're going to call him a terrorist.
They're going to smear him and slander him.
And I'm going to do that's why I did this video to exonerate him, clear his name.
He's not working with APEC.
That's not true at all.
So sorry, Amar, my my deepest apologies.
That's all for now, guys.
I'm Adam Green with No More News.
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