Statement by Founder of CAIR

Omar Ahmad, the founder of CAIR, made this statement in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qur’an should be the highest authority in America.” This was reported in the San Ramon Valley Herald on July 4, 1998.

Quoted from an article entitled, CAIR's Smear Job Against Brigitte Gabriel.

FBI Cuts Off CAIR Over Hamas Questions

The following is an article by Mary Jacoby
IPT News
January 29, 2009
http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/985

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has cut off contacts with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) amid mounting concern about the Muslim advocacy group's roots in a Hamas-support network, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has learned.

The decision to end contacts with CAIR was made quietly last summer as federal prosecutors prepared for a second trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), an Islamic charity accused of providing money and political support to the terrorist group Hamas, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

CAIR and its chairman emeritus, Omar Ahmad, were named un-indicted co-conspirators in the HLF case. Both Ahmad and CAIR's current national executive director, Nihad Awad, were revealed on government wiretaps as having been active participants in early Hamas-related organizational meetings in the United States. During testimony, FBI agent Lara Burns described CAIR as a front organization.

Hamas is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, and it's been illegal since 1995 to provide support to it within the United States.

The decision to end contacts with CAIR is a significant policy change for the FBI. For years, the FBI worked with the national organization and its state chapters to address Muslim community concerns about the potential for hate crimes and other civil liberty violations in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But critics said the FBI improperly conferred legitimacy on CAIR by meeting with its officials, even as its own investigative files contained evidence of CAIR leaders' ties to Hamas.

Last autumn, FBI field offices began notifying state CAIR chapters that bureau officials could no longer meet with them until CAIR's national leadership in Washington had addressed issues raised by the HLF trial, according to people with knowledge of the notifications.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper declined to comment Wednesday when the IPT called for comment. Before hanging up, Hooper said "We're more than happy to cooperate with legitimate media. But we don't cooperate with those who promote anti-Muslim bigotry."

In one letter obtained by IPT News, James E. Finch, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Oklahoma City field office, canceled a meeting of the local Muslim Community Outreach Program, a state-federal program designed to enlist Muslims in terrorism prevention and investigate reports of civil liberties violations.

"Regrettably, due to circumstances beyond my control, the meeting will be postponed until further notice as a result of the planned participation by the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations," Finch's Oct. 8, 2008 letter to Muslim groups in the Oklahoma outreach program said.

Finch made clear the Oklahoma office valued its relationship with local Muslims. He said the stumbling block to further outreach was CAIR's national leadership.

"[I]f CAIR wishes to pursue an outreach relationship with the FBI, certain issues must be addressed to the satisfaction of the FBI. Unfortunately, these issues cannot be addressed at the local level and must be addressed by the CAIR National Office in Washington, D.C.," the letter said.

A spokesman for the FBI's Oklahoma City office referred questions about the letter to the FBI's national press office. In Washington, FBI spokesman John Miller said, "We've certainly been in contact with CAIR chapters" about the un-indicted co-conspirator designation. "The letter speaks for itself."

Letters with similar wording were sent in other states, people with knowledge of the matter said. It is not known how many letters were issued, but the FBI has had strong working relationships with CAIR chapters in states including Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and Florida.

Hamas was formed in 1987 as the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamic political movement that aims to spread the rule of Shariah, or Islamic law, throughout the world.

A North American branch of the Brotherhood supervised HLF, CAIR and other organizations to build political, financial and public relations support for Hamas, evidence at the HLF trial showed.

The U.S.-based Brotherhood formed a Palestine Committee, headed by Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook, in 1988 during the first intifada uprising in Palestinian territories against Israel. Hamas's stated policy is for the destruction of Israel.

CAIR co-founders Ahmad and Awad were early active members of the Palestine Committee, evidence showed. Wiretaps recorded the two CAIR leaders participating in strategy meetings of the committee in the 1990s, and both were also on a phone list of its members, the evidence showed.

The first HLF trial in Texas ended in a mistrial in October 2007. In November 2008, the second trial resulted in convictions of five former HLF officials on all counts of providing material support to Hamas.

It is unclear what changed between the first and second HLF trials to make the FBI rescind its policy of outreach to CAIR. The un-indicted co-conspirator designations were made on May 27, 2007 in connection with the first HLF trial. Moreover, much of the evidence linking the CAIR officials to Hamas was aired in an earlier public trial in 2006.

CAIR, however, vigorously challenged the un-indicted co-conspirator designation as a violation of its First and Fifth Amendment rights, accusing the government of "demonization of all things Muslim" in a brief filed in the summer of 2007 with the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Click here to continue reading this article.

A Message From CAIR

(LOS ANGELES, CA, 12/3/08) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on American Muslims and other people of conscience to thank the Fox television network and the creator of "The Simpsons" for a recent episode that used comedy to challenge Islamophobia.

The episode, which aired Sunday evening and is titled "Mypods and Boomsticks," highlights anti-Muslim sentiment by featuring a young Muslim character named Bashir and his family who face prejudice after moving to Springfield. In the program, Homer Simpson wrongly suspects that Bashir's family is involved in a terror plot. Bart Simpson befriends Bashir and defends him from bullies.

To view the entire episode, click here.

CAIR's Greater Los Angeles Area office (CAIR-LA) sent a letter today to the show's creator Matt Groening thanking him for challenging anti-Muslim prejudice.

The letter said Sunday's episode "brought to light how Americans can work toward mutual respect and inclusion by getting to know their neighbors." It went on to state: "The episode also builds on the values that have made America the great nation it is a nation in which citizenship is about finding common ground and building a better society. American Muslims have been doing just that by making daily contributions to our society that often go unrecognized."

"Because of its acceptance in popular culture, comedy is often one of the best vehicles for challenging stereotypes and intolerance," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "Fox and Matt Groening are to be congratulated for tackling the disturbing phenomenon of Islamophobia."

THIS IS CAIR'S REQUESTED ACTION FOR ITS MUSLIM CONSTITUENTS:

Send a message expressing appreciation for highlighting both anti-Muslim attitudes and the need for mutual respect and inclusion in our society.

E-Mail: peter.liguori@fox.com (Peter Liguori, Chairman, Entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Co.); dana.walden@fox.com (Dana Walden, Chairman, Twentieth Century Fox Television); gary.newman@fox.com (Gary Newman, Chairman, Twentieth Century Fox Television) COPY TO: info@losangeles.cair.com

Citizen Warrior says: I suggest we do just the opposite. Muslims don't need any more politically-correct coddling. They already get far too much special treatment and they do not deserve it. Action requested: Write to those people and tell them a little about Islam. Ask them to read the Qur'an and quit being dhimmis. Ask them to please stop cooperating with taqiyya. Aks them to read up on CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Holy Land Foundation trial, and then try again.

CAIR's Obsession With "Obsession"

I was going to post this Monday, but since AOW has already discussing it, I'll post it now. Being the sneaky bastard that I am, I subscribed to the newsletters of all the pro-Muslim groups in America I could find. It has been an incredibly rich source of inspiration and insight. I've decided to become a Muslim. Just kidding.

It's fascinating to see how they spin the news, what they strongly dislike, and how they promote their cause.

CAIR has taken exception to the massive promotion of the movie, Obsession. Of course. In one of their op-ed columns, Ahmed Rehab (I'm not making this up) tries to make a good case against the movie, but fails miserably. He wrote, "First, it exploits Americans’ unfamiliarity with Islam and Muslims to suggest that deviant groups are somehow representative of most, if not all, Muslims."

And it went downhill from there. The movie doesn't, in fact, suggest that deviant groups are representative of most Muslims. It goes out of its way to suggest otherwise. In one of my few criticisms of the film, I think it goes TOO far out of its way to suggest otherwise. It does, however point out that "deviant" Muslims are following mainstream Islamic theology, which is an entirely different point leading to entirely different conclusions.

Also I thought it was interesting that Mr. Rehab would recognize Americans' unfamiliarity with Islam. It is this unfamiliarity that has made America so vulnerable to the relentless Islamic political encroachment CAIR strives to accelerate.

Rehab also wrote, "while the Muslim world has its share of fanatics, they comprise a tiny fraction of the population and are highly at odds with a mainstream society that aspires to peace and prosperity."

Now of course he might have meant the mainstream non-Muslim society. But even if he was referring to mainstream Muslims, he can say that in all sincerity. He and his audience know that the peace and prosperity they seek can best be achieved by a constant, unrelenting invasion and undermining of the U.S. government (and every other government). When all the world's governments are Islamic, they will have the true peace they aspire to. And when all those Christians and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists who do not want to give up their religion pay their jizya, they will have the prosperity they aspire to as well.

Some of Rehab's readers may know very little of this. If not, it is their own fault they live in ignorance of a faith they profess. They should either learn what they're professing or get the fuck out. But you can bet Rehab knows all about it. His bullshit is unadulterated taqiyya.

Fooling the Establishment

In a long, informative, and well-referenced article entitled, CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha show just how thoroughly Jihadis have duped the majority of people in the United States. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

When President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington several days after September 11, 2001, to signal that he would not tolerate a backlash against Muslims, he invited CAIR's executive director, Nihad Awad, to join him at the podium. Two months later, when Secretary of State Colin Powell hosted a Ramadan dinner, he, too, called upon CAIR as representative of Islam in America. More broadly, when the State Department seeks out Muslims to welcome foreign dignitaries, journalists, and academics, it calls upon CAIR. The organization has represented American Muslims before Congress. The National Aeronautics and Space Agency hosted CAIR's "Sensitivity and Diversity Workshop" in an effort to harmonize space research with Muslim sensibilities.

Law-enforcement agencies in Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Arizona, California, Missouri, Texas, and Kentucky have attended CAIR's sensitivity-training sessions. The organization boasts such tight relations with law enforcement that it claims to have even been invited to monitor police raids. In July 2004, as agents from the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, and Homeland Security descended on the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, a Saudi-created school in Merrifield, Virginia, a local paper reported that the FBI had informed CAIR's legal director, Arsalan Iftikhar, that morning that the raid was going to take place.

CAIR is also a media darling. It claims to log five thousand annual mentions on newspapers, television, and radio, including some of the most prestigious media in the United States. The press dutifully quotes CAIR's statistics, publishes its theological views, reports its opinions, rehashes its press releases, invites its staff on television, and generally dignifies its existence as a routine part of the American and Canadian political scenes.

CAIR regularly participates in seminars on Islamic cultural issues for corporations and has been invited to speak at many of America's leading universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia. American high schools have invited CAIR to promote its agenda, as have educationally-minded senior citizens.

Perhaps the most obvious problem with CAIR is the fact that at least five of its employees and board members have been arrested, convicted, deported, or otherwise linked to terrorism-related charges and activities.

1. Randall ("Ismail") Royer, an American convert to Islam, served as CAIR's communications specialist and civil rights coordinator; today he sits in jail on terrorism-related charges.

2. Ghassan Elashi, the founder of CAIR's Texas chapter, has a long history of funding terrorism.

3. Bassem Khafagi, an Egyptian native and CAIR's onetime community relations director, pleaded guilty in September 2003 to lying on his visa application and passing bad checks for substantial amounts in early 2001, for which he was deported.

4. Rabih Haddad, a CAIR fundraiser, was arrested in December 2001 on terrorism-related charges and deported from the United States due to his subsequent work as executive director of the Global Relief Foundation, a charity he cofounded which was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department in October 2002 for financing Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

5. Siraj Wahhaj, a CAIR advisory board member, was named in 1995 by U.S. attorney Mary Jo White as a possible unindicted coconspirator in the plot to blow up New York City landmarks led by the blind sheikh, Omar Abdul Rahman.

A class-action lawsuit brought by the estate of John P. O'Neill, Sr. charges CAIR and its Canadian branch of being, since their inception, "part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism" with a unique role in the terrorist network:

"both organizations have actively sought to hamper governmental anti-terrorism efforts by direct propaganda activities aimed at police, first-responders, and intelligence agencies through so-called sensitivity training. Their goal is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police departments and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities."

It would be hard to improve on this characterization; under the guise of participating in counterterrorism, CAIR does its best to impede these efforts. This approach can be seen from its statements.

According to filed copies of its annual Internal Revenue Service Form 990, CAIR's U.S. chapters have more than doubled their combined revenues from the $2.5 million they recorded in 2000 to $5.6 million in 2002.

[CAIR's) website explicitly denies that CAIR receives support from foreign sources: "We do not support directly or indirectly, or receive support from, any overseas group or government." However, this denial is flatly untrue, for CAIR has accepted foreign funding, and from many sources.

A press release from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington [for example] indicates that in August 1999, the Islamic Development Bank — a bank headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — gave CAIR $250,000 to purchase land for its Washington, D.C. headquarters.

CAIR has a key role in the "Wahhabi lobby"— the network of organizations, usually supported by donations from Saudi Arabia, whose aim is to propagate the especially extreme version of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. For one, it sends money to other parts of the lobby. According to CAIR's Form 990 filings for 2003, its California offices invested $325,000 with the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). The NAIT was established in 1971 by the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada, which bills itself as the precursor to the Islamic Society of North America, now the largest member of the Wahhabi lobby. According to Newsweek, authorities say that over the years "NAIT money has helped the Saudi Arabian sect of Wahhabism — or Salafism, as the broader, pan-Islamic movement is called — to seize control of hundreds of mosques in U.S. Muslim communities." J. Michael Waller, a terrorism expert, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that NAIT is believed to own 50 to 79 percent of the mosques in North America.

To fully appreciate what it means that more than half of U.S. mosques are promoting Saudi Islam, we refer to the Freedom House report, "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques." It explains that Saudi documents disseminated at U.S. mosques are telling America's Muslims that it is a religious obligation for them to hate Christians and Jews and warning that Muslims should not have Christians and Jews as friends, nor should they help them.

The Freedom House report indicates that Saudi publications disseminated by U.S. mosques: say it is lawful for Muslims to physically harm and steal from adulterers and homosexuals; condemn interpretations of Islam other than the strict "Wahhabi" version preached in Saudi Arabia; advocate the killing of those who convert out of Islam; assert that it is a Muslim's duty to eliminate the State of Israel; and promote the idea that women should be segregated and veiled and, of course, barred from some employment and activities. But not to worry; CAIR's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, tells us, "The majority of the stuff they picked is in Arabic, a language that most people in mosques don't read."

In addition, CAIR has resorted to financial pressure in an effort to silence critics. One such case concerns ABC radio personality Paul Harvey, who on December 4, 2003, described the vicious nature of cock fighting in Iraq, then commented: "Add to the [Iraqi] thirst for blood, a religion which encourages killing, and it is entirely understandable if Americans came to this bloody party unprepared." CAIR responded a day later with a demand for "an on-air apology." CAIR then issued a call to its supporters to contact Harvey's advertising sponsors to press them to pull their ads "until Harvey responds to Muslim concerns." Although Harvey quickly and publicly retracted his remarks, CAIR continued its campaign against him.

Another case of financial intimidation took place in March 2005, when CAIR campaigned to have National Review remove two books — Serge Trifkovic's The Sword of the Prophet: Islam; History, Theology, Impact on the World and J.L. Menezes' The Life and Religion of Mohammed — as well as the positive reviews of those books, from its on-line bookstore. CAIR claimed the books defame Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. When it did not get immediate satisfaction from National Review, it instructed its partisans to pressure the Boeing Corporation to withdraw its advertisements from the magazine. National Review briefly took down both books but then quickly reposted the one by Trifkovic. Trifkovic himself argued that CAIR's success here "will only whet Islamist appetites and encourage their hope that the end-result will be a crescent on the Capitol a generation or two from now."

In December 2003, CAIR ruined the career of an army officer and nurse, Captain Edwina McCall, who had treated American soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan but ended up resigning under a cloud of suspicion. Her crime? Using her military e-mail address on an Internet discussion board concerning the Islamist agenda. CAIR sent the comments to the secretary of defense, calling attention to her allegedly "bigoted anti-Muslim comments" and demanding that her "extremist and Islamophobic views" be investigated and then followed by "appropriate action." The Army immediately cast the officer under suspicion, leading her to resign from a career she had loved.