President Joe Biden’s National Security Council (NSC) hosted the head of Rahma Worldwide, a health nonprofit that has collaborated with Hamas on multiple occasions, the Washington Examiner reported.
CEO of Rahma Worldwide, Shadi Zaza (Credit: LinkedIn)
The NSC met with Shadi Zaza, Rahma Worldwide’s CEO, and other Syrian-American community leaders on Sept. 11 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to discuss how the U.S. can best counter the Assad regime in Syria, the Examiner reported. Zaza’s group, however, signed a cooperation agreement with Hamas in August, and Zaza himself was photographed alongside Hamas officials days before the terrorist organization carried out attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“We have spoken at length about our condemnation of Hamas and the horrible atrocities they committed on Oct. 7,” an NSC spokesperson told the Examiner, stressing that they were not aware of Rahma’s links to Hamas. The staffers who allowed an individual “openly supporting a foreign terrorist organization like Hamas to enter the Eisenhower Executive Office Building are either grossly incompetent or fully support Hamas,” an anonymous senior Republican Senate staffer who works on national security issues said to the Examiner.
White House leadership was not at the NSC meeting, which was run by “working-level staffers,” a source familiar told the Examiner.
Rahma signed an agreement with Hamas’ Gaza Health Ministry in August for a blood drive in Gaza, according to Palestinian media reviewed by the Examiner. The organization’s website shows that it has been highly active in Gaza, distributing food, hygienic goods and medical supplies to people in the region.
About a year prior, officials from the Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development were photographed alongside Rahma staffers and Zaza for an aid initiative targeting low-income families in Gaza, the Examiner reported. The meeting with Hamas officials happened at roughly the same time Rahma received approximately $175,000 through a Department of Health and Human Services subgrant to carry out a vaccine program, federal records show.
“That Rahma officials are meeting and partnering with senior Hamas figures in the same week they receive government funding is appalling,” Sam Westrop of the Middle East Forum told the Examiner. “The federal government is subsidizing terror.”
(Read more: The Daily Caller, 9/20/2024) (Archive)
Rahma Worldwide, also known as Rahma Relief, is a Michigan charity run by Shadi Zaza.
In Gaza, Rahma Worldwide revealed on October 30, in an apparently flagrant breach of U.S. law, that it works with and receives money from Kuwait’s Islamic Heritage Revival Society (RIHS), which the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization, because of its long history of support for Al-Qaeda, and its efforts to use “charity and humanitarian assistance as cover to fund terrorist activity and harm innocent civilians.” The RIHS is also accused of funding Hamas.
Rahma confirms that it is part of RIHS’s “Uprising for Palestine” campaign, and its collaboration with the group does not seem to be a one-off – the terrorist group’s logo appears in dozens of posts across Rahma’s social media pages.
Rahma’s president, Shadi Zaza also appears to have signed agreements with Hamas officials on behalf of Rahma Worldwide.
In the United States, Rahma has often organized events with radical clerics, such as the Hamas-tied Mohamad Rateb Al-Nabulsi, a Syrian cleric who appears on terrorist platforms such as “al Aqsa TV, the official network of the Hamas terrorist organization in Gaza,” where he calls for the killing of homosexuals, among other extremist statements. The Investigative Project on Terrorism notes that Nabulsi has expressed support for suicide bombings and declared that “All the Jewish people are combatants.” (Read more: Focus on Western Islamism, 11/14/2023) (Archive)