Who The Terror Apologists Support
Some of you may be familiar with a group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. This is a group that describes itself as the “Muslim NAACP.” Some of its leaders stood by President Bush and Colin Powell as those men spoke out against backlash against Muslims in the wake of 9/11. CAIR spokespeople are routinely quoted as authorities on the Muslim-American community and the relationship between Islam and the American population in general.
To many this group may sound benignly positive, even necessary, in this age of extreme tension between westerners and practitioners of Islam. The truth about this group, however, will probably shock a lot of people.
To quote Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha:
…there is another side to CAIR that has alarmed many people in positions to know. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to deal with it. Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) describes it as an organization “which we know has ties to terrorism.”[3] Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) observes that CAIR is “unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.”[4] Steven Pomerantz, the FBI’s former chief of counterterrorism, notes that “CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.”[5] The family of John P. O’Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having “been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism”[6] responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson calls it “a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas.”[7]
Of particular note are the American Muslims who reject CAIR’s claim to speak on their behalf. The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, publisher of the New Jersey-based Voice of Peace, called CAIR the champion of “extremists whose views do not represent Islam.”[8] Jamal Hasan of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance explains that CAIR’s goal is to spread “Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook.”[9] Kamal Nawash, head of Free Muslims Against Terrorism, finds that CAIR and similar groups condemn terrorism on the surface while endorsing an ideology that helps foster extremism, adding that “almost all of their members are theocratic Muslims who reject secularism and want to establish Islamic states.”
CAIR’s fostering of extremist Islam varies from the laughable – like their photoshopping of hijabs onto the bare heads of women pictured at a photo-op – to the horrifying, like their blatant antisemitism and support for Muslim supremacy. To this observer, it seems as though CAIR is little more than a well-funded propaganda group aimed at downplaying and whitewashing the danger of Islamic terrorism and extremism.
In 1998 the group demanded the removal of a billboard in Los Angeles which depicted Osama bin Laden as “America’s sworn enemy.”
In April of 2005 the founder of a Texas chapter of CAIR was convicted of supporting terrorism.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks CAIR was caught misdirecting funds they were allegedly gathering for 9/11 relief to Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a group that later had its funds frozen by the Treasury Department because the group was funding Hamas. Later, in 2004, the Holy Land Foundation was indicted for conspiracy, providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, tax evasion and money laundering (a case that is still in the works).
Just this year CAIR was pressuring schools to white wash the events of 9/11 in school textbooks in order to avoid giving students a bad impression of Islam.
I could go on and on about CAIR’s connections to international terrorism and their efforts to downplay the threat of terrorism here in America, but those examples should tell you pretty much all you need to know about this group.
So why am I telling you all of this about CAIR? Certainly America has its fair share of radical, extremist, racist groups…so what does it matter that CAIR represents one more entry in that category? It matters because we are in the midst of a war against the very ideology CAIR supports, and many of our elected leaders seem to have political agendas that match up much too closely with CAIR’s for comfort.
