CAIR and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month
Talk about over-reaching. This has been the month of miscalculations for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). And their plan started out so well…
On March 13, in spite of Republican objections, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-NJ) found CAIR a Congressional room of their own, that political accessory every lobbying group funded by UAE money
needs to demonstrate they’re in the mainstream (though reportedly they’ll have a $25 million endowment of their own soon, so hold off on sending help with the rent). 
CAIR’s presentation that morning was by Steven Krull of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, a program of the Center of Policy Attitudes which is - of course - sponsored by the George Soros funded Tides Foundation and the ultraliberal Joyce Foundation.
Such a busy day - later that afternoon, CAIR held a news conference to announce the filing of a discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Airways by the six “flying imams” who were removed from a flight in Minneapolis last November. In the suit, they named as defendants not just US Airways and the Minneapolis Metropolitan Airports Commission, but also the captain of the plane, the flight attendants, desk agents and passengers.
Talk about being on a roll. In the third part of this plan, as a kind of double-axel-triple-toe-loop-pirouette, the New York Times on March 14 ran Neil MacFarquhar’s puff piece on CAIR, an article so flattering, so untouched by actual facts, so graceful in its coordination with the litigious events of the prior day, that not one but two excellent analyses have since been written to set the record straight. First, an excerpt from Steve Emerson’s article “One Muslim Advocacy Group’s Not-So-Secret Terrorist Ties - Unfit Print” at The New Republic Online:
While the Times did not see fit to provide its readers with any of CAIR’s “controversial” statements (Awad in 1994: “I am in support of the Hamas movement”), the paper did disingenuously quote one of CAIR’s most dangerous supporters. Former FBI agent Michael Rolince–who spent much of his time at the agency championing “partnership” between Islamist groups and law enforcement (and has, since his retirement, frequented the Islamist speaking and fund-raising circuit) told MacFarquhar, “Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares.”
Not only is this a total falsehood, but it’s also a conflict of interest. Rolince was involved in a highly controversial program, eventually de-funded and cancelled by the FBI, that would have funneled millions of dollars to a constellation of radical Muslim groups, including CAIR (to, in the words of the Times, “institutionalize bridge building”). I have met with Rolince several times, and he simply refused to read the materials on CAIR that I, and others, provided. Moreover, Mike Rolf, a retired FBI agent, disagrees with Rolince’s casual acceptance of CAIR. Rolf states, “It is clear that CAIR has had a number of people in positions of power within the organization that have been directly connected to terrorism and have either been prosecuted or thrown out of the country” and has said that, despite Rolince’s contention, “there are no blank stares from people working in counterterrorism in the U.S., and it is troubling that CAIR seems unable to directly and specifically condemn terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.”
Read it all, send it on - one of the best compilations of facts out there on CAIR’s real strategic intent and tactics.
And Alex Alexiev at the Center for Security Policy sets the record straight - “The New York Times is shilling for the Islamists”:
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. He might as well have had in mind what used to pass as the “newspaper of record.” That the New York Times has long shown unabashed bias in favor of any and all leftist causes is hardly news, but that it is now doing the same with respect to radical Islam is novel and disturbing, if not altogether surprising. A case in point is the March 14, 2007, Neal MacFarquhar’s front page puff piece on the radical Islamist Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR) entitled “Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S.”
MacFarquhar’s egregious bias is openly on display in both what he says about CAIR, and even more so in what he does not say about the self-appointed “largest Muslim human rights organization in America.”
To start with the former, MacFarquhar informs us that a “small band” of conservative critics “have made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it (CAIR) to Hamas and Hezbollah,” the US Government-designated terrorist organizations. Further, he cites unnamed government officials who compare the “standards used by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism, essentially guilt by association,” while a retired FBI official is trotted out complaining that asking the critics “for cold hard facts, you get blank stares.”
The bottom line, according to MacFarquhar, is that “there were no charges linked to CAIR in any of the (terrorism related) cases involved” and, moreover, government officials “were not aware of any criminal investigation of the group.” And lest there is any doubt as to who is behind the organized smear of this noble civil rights organization, why, it’s the Jews, of course, in the guise of ”pro-Israeli lobbyists” who, we are told, have created “a cottage industry of attacking the group and anyone dealing with it.”
Really? It just so happens that the “small band” of critics include such prominent “conservatives” as Senator Chuck Schumer who has stated in the congressional record that CAIR “has ties to terrorism” and “intimate links with Hamas.” And it just so happens that several CAIR officials have already been prosecuted by the US government and sent to jail or deported for terrorism-related activities while employed by CAIR. So much for “no charges linked to CAIR.”
“McCarthyism, guilt by association?” Rather, proven guilt for associating with terrorists, for which CAIR’s “National Civil Rights Coordinator and Communications Specialist,” Randall Ismail Royer, for instance, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. “Cold hard facts,” “blank stares?” Perhaps the former FBI official meant the blank stare of one Ghassan Elashi, founder of CAIR-Texas and the Hamas front Holy Land Foundation, closed down by the US government as a terror financier, as he was carted off to jail. Mr. Elashi, already serving a six and a half year sentence, is soon to be tried again on the more serious charge of conspiracy to fund Palestinian terrorists.
Apropos, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), its close association with CAIR and terrorism funding is just one of those “cold hard facts” that Mr. MacFarquhar would rather not talk about; for if he did, he would have to acknowledge that CAIR not only openly collected donations for HLF on its website, but was itself a beneficiary of seed money from it while being incorporated. Nor are the New York Times reporter and his editor interested in providing some background on how CAIR came into being as a spin-off from the Hamas clearing house in the United States, the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP) – an organization founded and financed by top Hamas operative Abu Musa Marzook in 1981. That would have required telling the reader that as IAP’s pro-Hamas activities became impossible to hide, its top officials, Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad and Rafeeq Jaber, simply incorporated CAIR in 1994, moved over and became the top honchos of a brand-new Hamas front.
As for IAP’s terrorist bona-fides, in December of 2004, a federal judge in Chicago found it and the Holy Land Foundation liable for $156 mln awarded to the estate of David Boim, an American teenager murdered by Hamas terrorists in Israel. No wonder IAP ceased to exist shortly thereafter.
Faced with examples of such grotesquely slanted reporting in a reputable newspaper, critics often tend to blame it on journalistic ignorance. That excuse would not hold much water in this case. All of the facts discussed above are widely known and easily available to anyone with access to Google and an hour of time. Apparently, Mr. MacFarquhar and his New York Times editor deliberately chose to disregard them. This used to be called propaganda. Or was it disinformation?
CAIR’s triple-play almost worked: using Congress, the Courts and the Press, all in 24 hours, as a preamble to introducing legislation such as the End to Racial Profiling Act. 
And if it had been a year or two ago, it might have. But we’ve gotten smarter and tougher, and a lot more efficient. Less than a week after the press conference, the Congress, the press and U.S. citizens - including U.S. Muslims - graded CAIR’s performance: F, for fail, flunk, flounder, flop, fizzle.
According to news reports, the passengers who tipped off the flight crew were Arabic-speaking Muslims themselves. And an emerging leader of the anti-CAIR movement among reform liberal U.S. Muslims, Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy , started raising money for legal fees for passengers who could be named as defendants. A high powered law firm offered to defend any passengers pro-bono. In days, three initiatives were offered in Congress to protect passengers who report suspicious activity.
On March 28 - just two weeks after the announcement of the suit - Republicans in the House forced Democrats to include a provision in their new public transportation bill that protects passengers who report suspicious activity from getting sued by the suspects.
I love it when a plan works.
When I was at the
The major issue that keeps me out of the ranks of the moonbats is that I love my country. No matter what Nancy Pelosi and Hillary do when they’re running the place, I still love my country.
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The “Press Freedom Award 2007” will go to American historian Daniel Pipes in acknowledgement of his fight for freedom of speech, his opposition to Islamism, his work for academic freedom in American universities, and his support for Muslim dissidents who speak out against Mecca.