An aerial view of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Hussam Ayloush, a senior Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) official, called for Israel’s “regime” to be “terminated” in a tweet on Sunday.

“Iran’s regime calling Israel a ‘cancerous tumor’ is like the pot calling the kettle black. All the people of that region will be better off once both murderous regimes are terminated,” Ayloush wrote.

Based on this tweet, one might assume that Ayloush has an equal disdain for the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel. However, whereas Ayloush would like to see regime change in Iran, he has a history of describing Israel in ways that echo Iranian rhetoric calling for the Jewish state’s destruction.

Ayloush has referred to Israelis as “zionazis,” and repeatedly equated the Israel Defense Forces with ISIS terrorists.

“You know how many hundreds of Jewish American kids are recruited to join the Israeli occupation army? Hundreds. Every year. They leave their country, leave America, to go join with an army that is engaged, with no debate, in major violations of human rights, and maybe some would argue, and I’m one of them, war crimes,” Ayloush said in May 2018, adding that “no one has ever established a … program to see, why would normal Jewish American kids leave their home and join to be part of an army committing war crimes.”

But that kind of comparison “is frankly insane,” British Muslim Maajid Nawaz, a former radical who now fights Islamist ideologies, said previously. Furthermore, Ayloush’s claim is also antisemitic according to the US State Department’s definition established in 2010.

According to the State Department, demonizing Israel by “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” and “denying Israel the right to exist” constitutes antisemitism, instead of legitimate criticism of Israel.

Now Ayloush is trying to equate Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran — the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism, which continues to actively plot attacks throughout the West.

Ayloush runs CAIR’s Los Angeles chapter, and remains politically influential despite his radical views on the Middle East conflict. According to his Facebook profile, he remains a delegate to California’s Democratic Party.

As we’ve noted previously, in addition to comparing Israel to the world’s greatest terrorists, he also bristles at the very question of whether Hamas is a terrorist organization. In a 2013 exchange captured on video, Ayloush angrily dismissed that question as “not acceptable,” telling the questioner it “proves that you have nothing but bigotry in you.”

It’s difficult to imagine a parallel circumstance in which a prominent public figure calls for the “termination” of a foreign state and manages to retain his influence. Yet Ayloush seems to have gotten away with it.

Steven Emerson is considered one of the leading authorities on Islamic extremist networks, financing, and operations. He serves as the Executive Director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, a non-profit organization that serves one of the world’s largest storehouses of archival data and intelligence on Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.