Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon is doubling down in the campaign's final days on her fierce opposition to Israel, promoting an endorsement she received from a virulently anti-Israel group that shares ties with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and whose founder has represented several alleged terrorists in court, including some linked to al Qaeda.
Emgage Action, a Muslim advocacy group that calls Israel an "apartheid" state that engages in "genocide" and blames the Jewish state for causing the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, donated $3,500 to the Nixon campaign in April, and now the dues-paying Democratic Socialist touts the group's endorsement of her candidacy on her website. Emgage Action was founded in 2006 by Khurrum Wahid, a Florida criminal defense attorney who has represented several convicted terrorists in criminal courts, including Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who in 2006 was sentenced to 30 years in prison for aiding al Qaeda and for conspiring to assassinate then-president George W. Bush.
Nixon—who first made a name for herself three years ago by taking a lonely stand against Israel in the Florida legislature a month after Oct. 7—is a natural fit for Emgage, which endorses candidates who are committed to fighting Islamophobia and "reining in ICE" and rejects candidates "aligned with AIPAC." Nixon's ties to the group date long before her run for Senate. Emgage boasted in an April 2025 report titled "Initiatives on Palestine" that it played a key role in supporting the Nov. 6, 2023, resolution she introduced in the Florida House calling for a ceasefire in Israel's war against Hamas. The resolution vaulted Nixon to national prominence in liberal and Muslim circles but was widely panned as antisemitic by many of her colleagues, who roundly rejected it in a bipartisan 104-2 vote.
Prior to founding Emgage, Wahid was a legal adviser to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which was designated as an unindicted co-conspirator of a Hamas front group in 2007. Wahid also once served as director of CAIR Florida, which invited Nixon to speak at several fundraising events after the 2024 elections, where she declared those who voted against her ceasefire resolution her "permanent enemies" and ranted against the "false capitalistic American dream," the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Nixon is not the only prominent Democrat to have embraced Emgage. Emgage endorsed former vice president Kamala Harris's presidential campaign in 2024, and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, rallied with the group at a campaign event that focused largely on the war in Gaza.
The Florida Democrat's embrace of Emgage pairs with her unapologetic support of several notorious black power militants, including convicted murderers, terrorists, and armed robbers, which Nixon honors on a memorial wall in her Jacksonville cafe and bookstore. The wall includes a photo of Assata Shakur, who was convicted in 1977 of first-degree murder of a New Jersey state trooper but escaped from prison two years later and fled to Cuba, where she lived the rest of her days on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list before dying of natural causes in 2025.
Nixon passionately defended the wall during a campaign event in October, saying it honors "people who came from the civil rights movement, who actually were fighting back and pushing back against discrimination."
Nixon's embrace of Emgage surfaces during the tumultuous final stretch of her Senate campaign. On Tuesday, a watchdog group filed a legal complaint with six federal and state agencies alleging the Florida Democrat violated myriad federal and state laws through the operation of her bookstore stemming from her failure to report to the IRS what happened to the $270,000 in charitable funds she raised in 2024, ostensibly to support the shop.
Nixon is also the subject of a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for her failure to disclose her $14,000 IRS tax debt in her Senate financial disclosure.
