https://imprintnews.org/youth-services-insider/icwa-author-sen-james-abourezk-dies-at-92/239029
Abourezk, the first Arab American to serve in the U.S. Senate, represented South Dakota in both houses of Congress in the 1970s. Having grown up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where his parents had landed after immigrating from Lebanon, he was an early champion of Indigenous rights and sponsored ICWA and other laws that reshaped the federal government’s tribal relations.
During the early years of Abourezk’s tenure in the Senate, the Association on American Indian Affairs released the results of a 5-year study that found as many as one-third of Native children were being taken into foster care, nearly all of them being placed with non-Native foster or adoptive families, permanently severed from their tribal communities…
Abourezk left the Senate in 1979, deciding not to run for reelection. He focused on advocating for civil rights for Arab Americans, creating the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. His work in this realm was not without controversy: In 2007, he told a Hezbollah-backed TV news station that Zionists had helped orchestrate the 9/11 attacks as a plot to sow Islamophobia, and that Zionists controlled the U.S. Congress. [My Emphasis.]
https://www.congress.gov/member/james-abourezk/A000017?q=%7B%22sponsorship%22%3A%22sponsored%22%7D
https://x.com/Villgecrazylady/status/1974960781973168386
