Last week, the Biden administration discontinued working with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), on a national strategy to combat anti-Semitism.
Reports surfaced that CAIR executive director, Nihad Awad, told a pro-Palestine gathering this November “he was ‘happy’ to witness Hamas’ terror attack against Israel on Oct 7.” He also said, “Israel as an occupying power does not have [the] right to self-defense.”
To anyone familiar with CAIR’s true mission -- not its disguise as a “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization” -- Awad’s remarks are no surprise. As far back as 1994 Awad publicly announced his support for “the Hamas movement.”
But some of you might be asking, What is CAIR, anyhow?
The better question is, What is the Muslim Brotherhood? Because CAIR is the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.
The Muslim Brotherhood is “without question the world’s most influential modern Islamist organization.” It was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, Islamic scholar and admirer of Hitler and the Nazis. He coined the term “Islamist” as part of his work towards a politicized Islam able to achieve total global conquest: “It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
“[T[he parent organization of Hamas and al Qaeda (and Islamic Jihad),” explains Islam expert Robert Spencer, Muslim Brotherhood Alumni include 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Islamism’s chief expounder, the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
In Egypt, the Brotherhood’s efforts to “dominate” included assassinating the Egyptian prime minister in 1948, attempting to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954, and participating in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 for making peace with Israel.
Frequently banished from Egypt, the Brotherhood grew a substantial membership in Syria, Jordan, Libya, Tunisia – up to 80 countries today -- western countries included. In democracies like the U.S., the Brotherhood avoids jihadist rhetoric, relying instead on deception and “camouflage,” to “appear moderate and use existing institutions to gain power.” A 1991 Muslim Brotherhood “Explanatory Memorandum” describes the “process for settlement” in North America as a “civilizational-jihadist process… a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house… so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”
The Brotherhood spun off the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in 1979. The PIJ’s mission is “to establish an Islamist Palestinian state that is committed to the destruction of Israel.” It was the PIJ’s misfired rocket, intended for Israel, that exploded in the parking lot of Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.
In Gaza, the Brotherhood created the Islamic Resistance Movement, what we know as Hamas, in 1987. Hamas’s 1988 Covenant expressly identifies it as “one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.” The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, in an October 2023 report, summarizes the Covenant as: “Palestine, nationalism, and Islamic law (sharia), and… fundamental rejection of any negotiations with Israel.” Hamas demands “the complete destruction of Israel and creation in its place of an Islamist state in all of historic Palestine,” achievable “only through violence -- specifically jihad.”
To assist Hamas in its terrorist activities, the Muslim Brotherhood activated its various offshoots around the world, including the formation of the Palestine Committee in the United States. The Committee set up subsidiary organizations, including the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) to handle propaganda, and the Holy Land Foundation, (HLF) a front raising money for Hamas ostensibly destined for needy children in the Middle East.
Hamas could operate legally in the U.S. until the early nineties, but the Palestine Committee knew that was going to change. A new front group was needed, able to promote Hamas, within the law. This became the focus of Palestine Committee leaders gathered for a Philadelphia convention in 1993. FBI wiretaps recorded IAP President Omar Ahmed stressing the need for “infiltrating the American media outlets, universities and research centers,” and establishing a headquarters in Washington to gain necessary “influence in Congress.” Public Relations Director Nihad Awad “highlight[ed] the importance of writing op-eds in prominent American newspapers…. using tones that are quite different from those used in Arabic.” Conflicting messages for western or Arabic audiences became a favorite Brotherhood ploy.
The Committee envisioned an organization with no apparent ties to Hamas, “operating in ways that would have made it appear as moderate in the eyes of Americans.” They compared it to a basketball player’s “head fake.”
The next year, was incorporated by three IAP leaders -- Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber -- incorporated CAIR, which Awad hired as Executive Director. That same year, Awad was declaring to a university audience, “I am in support of the Hamas movement.”
The head fake succeeded beyond all expectations. For decades CAIR has been revered as America’s premier “Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization,” despite its transparent support of Hamas and its goal of annihilating Israel. CAIR’s website significantly boasts of providing “first-hand training on Islam and those who practice the faith” to local police departments, Homeland Security, and the FBI.
Last week’s White House embarrassment at partnering with genocide sympathizers is hardly the first time CAIR has made chumps of federal officials.
Right after 9/11 FBI Director Robert Mueller chose CAIR as a “liaison partner” – teaching agents Islam’s total lack of connection to terrorism. But in 2009, Mueller was forced to break it off with CAIR when CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 terrorism trial of the Hamas “charitable front,” the Holy Land Foundation. The trial judge found, “The government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR with Hamas.”
But the CAIR co-conspirators were never indicted, despite the “mountain of evidence” amassed during the HLF investigation, and prosecutors raring to go with indictments of CAIR officials. According to a DoJ source interviewed by investigative reporter Patrick Poole, higher-ups in Obama’s DoJ “scuttled” those prosecutions, because prosecuting their “interfaith allies” would make the administration “look like absolute fools.” Notes Poole, “It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DoJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts.”
Likewise, under pressure from the organization’s leaders. Mueller quickly reversed CAIR’s banishment. CAIR then forced the FBI to “purge[] all anti-terrorism training material deemed ‘offensive’ to Muslims,” like a “highly inflammable” article that “inaccurately argues the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.” Also scrubbed were instructions “conflating Islamic Militancy with terrorism.”
So alas, this current Biden spat with CAIR won’t last. As reported by the Daily Caller, when the administration announced cutting ties with CAIR, they “brushed aside years of its documented history of antisemitic statements years prior.” And Biden, unprincipled to begin with, is surrounded by Obama-era holdovers and elite-university snowflakes steeped in Obama’s anti-Israel venom.
Poole’s source mentioned one other reason Eric Holder’s DoJ quashed the CAIR indictments: Because people the source knew at DOJ “see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies… fighting the same revolution.”
That’s why it won’t be long before CAIR -- Hamas’s ambassadors in America -- are welcomed back to the White House.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
Image: CAIR
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