Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) continues freely to operate in America. In the wee hours of election night 2016, in fact, its Los Angeles office leader called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
The Trump administration has stated its commitment to fighting Islamic supremacism, including the Muslim Brotherhood itself.
To what lengths would America’s leaders go to protect a group that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) deemed a terrorist organization?
A bombshell new report from the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) reveals the alarming answer.
It involves a man who in his almost 50 years of public life has done more for America’s enemies — first of the Communist variety and later of the jihadist brand — than perhaps any other: Iran lobbyist-in-chief John Kerry.
In the most recent case, he did so in secret, apparently well aware of the political consequences of exposing the potentially catastrophic policy he was pursuing to the light of day.
As IPT’s report details, Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) were classified as terrorist groups by the UAE in 2014, as two of the 83 entities identified as such for their ties to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Furious at such a charge, CAIR pushed Secretary of State Kerry to lobby on its behalf. Kerry’s State Department reportedly complied, meeting with UAE officials regularly to plead CAIR’s case.
State signaled such a stance publicly almost from day one. As IPT notes:
At a daily State Department press briefing two days after UAE released its list, a spokesman said that State does not “consider CAIR or MAS to be terrorist groups” but that it was seeking more information from UAE about their decision. He added that “as part of our routine engagement with a broad spectrum of faith based organizations, a range of U.S. government officials have met with officials of CAIR and MAS. We at the State Department regularly meet with a wide range of faith based groups to hear their views even if some of their views expressed at times are controversial.”
“Controversial” is an interesting way of describing the views of a group that makes common cause with jihadists and jihadist sympathizers. There is an irony, as IPT recounts:
Just days before the UAE’s 2014 designation of CAIR as a terrorist group in the organization’s San Francisco chapter bestowed its “Promoting Justice” award to Sami Al-Arian and his family. Al-Arian secretly ran an American support network for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist group in the late 1980s and early 1990s. PIJ was responsible for terrorist attacks which killed dozens of Israelis and several Americans.
CAIR’s jihadi ties are numerous and longstanding, involving not only the links of its founders and present leaders to Hamas, and as critics say, apologists for Islamic terrorism, but also for impeding counterterrorism efforts. Lawyers in a class-action lawsuit representing the family of slain former FBI counterterrorism official John P. O’Neill — who perished in the 9/11 attacks at the World Trade Center — named CAIR part of a criminal conspiracy to promote “radical Islamic terrorism,” and declared that CAIR has
“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.”
