Summary: The terrorist-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) claims to be America’s largest civil rights organization for Muslims. But its agenda has more to do with the Islamization of America than with protecting Muslims from civil rights abuses.
Capital Research Center last examined the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its aggressive, jihad terrorism-whitewashing Islamists in the August 2005Organization Trends. CAIR statements and actions in recent years show that this organization, which sprang out of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, has in no way changed its radical spots—a fact that ought to call into question its continuing respectability in media and politics.
The basics
Information about CAIR’s revenue sources is surprisingly difficult to come by. IRS filings reveal donations to CAIR by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($30,000 since 2008), Silicon Valley Community Foundation ($90,000 since 2008), and Tides Foundation ($5,000 since 2002). CAIR is actually registered as CAIR Foundation Inc., a public charity recognized under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code. That entity reported a budget of $2,632,410 in 2014 and gross receipts of $2,355,032. It also claims to have had 28 employees in 2014 and 40 volunteers. Many of CAIR’s state and local chapters are separately incorporated as nonprofits.
CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber. The three men were linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and created to serve as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States. CAIR opened an office in Washington, D.C., by using a $5,000 grant from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a charity that the Bush administration closed down in 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization.”
CAIR’s ties to terrorists are recognized on Capitol Hill. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has said, “CAIR is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Before leaving Congress in 2013, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) said, “Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”
Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of Texas CAIR, was convicted in 2005 of terrorism-related offenses and sentenced to almost seven years imprisonment. CAIR civil rights director Randall Todd Royer was given 20 years for federal weapons and explosives convictions in 2004. Bassem Khafagi, a community affairs director at CAIR, was convicted in 2003 on bank and visa fraud charges and shipped back to Egypt. Rabih Haddad, a fundraiser for CAIR’s chapter in Ann Arbor, Mich., was detained in 2001 for overstaying his visa. Authorities found a firearm and considerable ammunition in his home. He served 19 months in prison and was then deported to Lebanon in 2003. CAIR board member Abdurahman Alamoudi was sentenced to 23 years imprisonment for directing at least $1 million to al-Qaeda. (See Foundation Watch, December 2015.)
“Contending that American Muslims are the victims of wholesale repression, CAIR has provided sensitivity training to police departments across the United States, instructing law officers in the art of dealing with Muslims respectfully,” according to DiscoverTheNetworks. The estate of 9/11 victim John O’Neill Sr., a senior FBI counter-terrorism agent, filed a lawsuit claiming that CAIR’s goal “is to create as much self-doubt, hesitation, fear of name-calling, and litigation within police department and intelligence agencies as possible so as to render such authorities ineffective in pursuing international and domestic terrorist entities.”
