Three Islamic groups have been named "as participants in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support a Palestinian Arab terrorist group, Hamas".
Prosecutors applied the label of "unindicted co-conspirator" to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America, and the North American Islamic Trust in connection with a trial planned in Texas next month for five officials of a defunct charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
While the foundation was charged in the case, which was filed in 2004, none of the other groups was. However, the co-conspirator designation could be a blow to the credibility of the national Islamic organizations, which often work hand-in-hand with government officials engaged in outreach to the Muslim community.
Unfortunately, in the case of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) they have been given too much credibility; especially by members of our government.
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.[14] More broadly, when the State Department seeks out Muslims to welcome foreign dignitaries, journalists, and academics, it calls upon CAIR.[15] 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.[16]
Law-enforcement agencies in Florida, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Arizona, California, Missouri, Texas, and Kentucky have attended CAIR's sensitivity-training sessions.[17] The organization boasts such tight relations with law enforcement that it claims to have even been invited to monitor police raids.[18] 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.[19] 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.[20]
That CAIR is a supporter of Islamist ideology is often thinly veiled. Geneive Abdo writing in the Washington Post back in March, made no bones about the goals of CAIR.
...Western hopes for full integration by Muslims in the West are unlikely to be realized and that the future of the Islamic world will be much more Islamic than Western.
Instead of championing the loud voices of the secular minority who are capturing media attention with their conferences, manifestos and memoirs, the United States would be wise instead to pay more attention to the far less loquacious majority.
Of course the "loud voices" of the "secular" Muslim Minority are many
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."[10] Tashbih Sayyed of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance calls CAIR "the most accomplished fifth column" in the United States.[11] And Stephen Schwartz of the Center on Islamic Pluralism writes that "CAIR should be considered a foreign-based subversive organization, comparable in the Islamist field to the Soviet-controlled Communist Party, USA."[12]
CAIR, for its part, dismisses all criticism, blaming negative comments on "Muslim bashers" who "can never point to something CAIR has done in its 10-year history that is objectionable."[13] Actually, there is much about the organization's history that is objectionable—and it is readily apparent to anyone who bothers to look.
You can find some this within the pages of this blog; here, here, and here, for instance.
CAIR has also made inroads with the ACLU not only have the ACLU defended a number of Palestinian terrorists, they have had a CAIR member at-large board member of the Florida branch. Dr. Ahmed won a Civil Liberties award in 2002 from the South-Central Pennsylvania chapter of the ACLU. But
At a CAIR-sponsored event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 16, titled “Religious and Political Perspectives on the Cartoon Controversy,” (just a week and a half after the ACLU and Ahmed formally cemented their relationship), Ahmed called for the government of the United States, and those around the world, to adopt “blasphemy” laws as a manner to ensure that the cartoons, originally published by a Danish newspaper, could never be published again. At the event, Ahmed stated:
“I think the next steps would be to broaden the scope of anti-hate laws and even contemplate about passing blasphemy laws, because blasphemy with such sacred icons, like the Prophet Muhammad, like the Koran, or the cross, or other religious symbols … So governments, legislatures, international bodies … must contemplate about what are the ways in which an anti-blasphemy law can be passed that can protect the right to exercise freedom of religion.”
I myself fail to see how "blasphemy laws" enhance Civil Liberties especially when they are so biased for a single religion.
One can only hope that the recent declaration by the Justice Department reduces the influence of CAIR to, oh, about zero. At the very least one would hope that we stop inviting them into our schools and we stop using them to conduct "sensitivity training" to our law enforcement officers.
