Ojaala Ahmad, an anti-Israel activist and former communications staffer for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has praised Hamas hostage takers, is running for the Anaheim City Council from District 1.
Her specific reasons for running are unknown, as are her proposed policy priorities for Anaheim. What is crystal clear is she adheres to a radically anti-Israel ideology that exempts Palestinians terror groups like Hamas of any moral culpability in the current strife. Her social media accounts are a non-stop transmission belt of anti-Israel posts lambasting the Jewish state’s war against the terrorist group Hamas while ignoring the reason for the war: the planned, deliberate massacre of 1,200 innocent Israelis – including women and children – on October 7 by Hamas.
Ahmad served on the Anaheim Housing & Community Development Commission from May 2017 to Mar 2019, to which she was nominated by former Councilman Jose F. Moreno.
She also worked as communications coordinator for the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations for several years, from 2014 to 2018. CAIR has courted controversy for years, and following the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians, it’s co-founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, expressed his support for the Hamas attacks.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on Oct. 7,” Awad said at the 16th Annual Convention for Palestine in Chicago on Nov. 24 of last year . “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.”
Awad’s comment prompted the Biden Administration to disavow CAIR and break ties with the group.
Ahmad’s only direct acknowledgment of the Hamas’ premeditated mass murder was this November 7, 2023 post in which she essentially blames Israel, characterizing the October 7 massacre as just another military engagement in a long war between Israel and Palestinian fighters dating back to the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948.
In this October 28, 2023 post – only three weeks after the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust – Ahmad compares the Israeli response the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust:
In this December 2, 2023 post, Ahamad lauds the Hamas terrorists because their unwilling hostages were “treated so well.” Nowhere Ahmad condemn Hamas for kidnapping innocent people to use as bargaining chips, nor does she comment on the dozens of Hamas hostages who have died::
Here, Ahmad characterizes Israel’s campaign of self-defense to destroy the brutal Hamas terrorist organization – and U.S. support for that campaign – as an “Israeli-U.S. war against the Palestinian people” – treating the Palestinian people as inseparable from Hamas.
This past May, Ahmad characterized Biden Administration support for Israel as Satanic:
Ahmad’s social media posts do provide some insight into her views as they would intersect the core local government function of preserving public order and safety.
This spring, radical student groups sympathetic to Hamas and hostile to Israel’s right to exist illegally occupied campus squares across the country – intimidating Jewish students, trespassing, occupying school buildings and disrupting campus life. When police were called into several campuses to restore law and order, they were met with massive physical resistance by student radicals. In Ahmad’s view, it was the police who were in the wrong – equating their lawful actions to restore public order and safety as an attack on freedom:
Also in the realm of public safety, Ahmad was a vocal supporter of Prop. 47, which essentially decriminalized theft and laid the groundwork for the rash of “smash and grab” shoplifting sprees and organized retail theft gangs:
There is a proposition on the ballot this November which will make a number of fixes to Prop. 47with the aim of deterring, rather than incentivizing, mass theft.
