CAIR's cynical exploitation of 'hate crimes'

CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper speaks to media, with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad to his left.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror-financing plot, once again is claiming to be the victim of an "Islamophobic"-motivated attack, but the Washington, D.C.-based organization has a habit of making claims that it can't back up with facts.

CAIR officials claimed Dec. 10 they had received a "foreign substance" in the mail along with "hate messages" both at their Washington, D.C., headquarters and at their branch in Santa Clara, California, prompting an evacuation of the offices.

CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad and Communication Director Ibrahim Hooper later acknowledged authorities concluded that the envelope found at the national office contained no hazardous material, but the CAIR officials insisted they receive hate messages, hate mail and threats online “all the time.” In an interview with ABC News on Dec. 13, Awad claimed “the number of recent threats have gone up significantly since Trump’s comments, San Bernardino shooting and Paris attacks.”

But a longtime observer of CAIR, Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, has documented that the organization and other Muslims "have on many occasions in the past not hesitated to stoop even to fabricating 'hate crimes,' including attacks on mosques."

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In a roundup of incidents, Spencer said CAIR "and other groups like it want and need hate crimes against Muslims, because they can use them for political points and as weapons to intimidate people into remaining silent about the jihad threat."

The day after Thanksgiving, for example, CAIR claimed the shooting of a Muslim cab driver in Pittsburgh was an anti-Muslim hate crime.

But as Spencer pointed out on his Jihad Watch site, five days later, police identified the suspect as a man by the name of Mohamed.

In a widely reported case in September, CAIR promoted a claim of "Islamophobia" by a 14-year-old Texas boy, Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested and suspended for bringing to school what he claimed was a science project. But his "project" was completely voluntary – there had been no school assignment – and it had all the looks of a suitcase bomb to reasonable observers, including school officials who stood by their actions in the face of a national "Stand With Ahmed" campaign promoted by CAIR that drew the support of President Obama. Sympathy dwindled as more facts were revealed, including the political activism of his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who has made two unsuccessful runs for the president of Sudan.

Immediately after the San Bernardino shooting, CAIR held a press conference featuring the brother-in-law of suspect Syed Farook, Farhan Khan, who declared: "I have no idea why he would do that," despite the strong evidence since then that Farook was a devout Muslim who was motivated by his faith to murder 14 people and wound 17 others before he and his Pakistani-born wife were killed by police in a shootout.

CAIR also has used legal means to push its charge of "Islamophobia," only to be rendered speechless when forced by a court to back up its claims.

In a lawsuit CAIR filed in 2009 against an undercover investigative team that published evidence of CAIR's ties to Islamic jihad, the group alleged its reputation was harmed, and it sought damages in court. But a federal court in Washington determined CAIR failed to present a single fact showing it had been harmed, and the organization gave up that specific claim against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, whose findings were published in the WND Books expose, "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America.

In a May 27, 2014, ruling, the U.S. District Court in Washington observed that CAIR had been "frustratingly unclear as to the injuries at issue for each of the claims." The court found CAIR speaks "in broad generalizations, asserting injuries and damages and proximate cause across multiple counts and multiple Plaintiffs."

CAIR, shown by FBI evidence to have been established in the U.S. by the Muslim Brotherhood as a front group, was named by federal prosecutors in 2007 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund Hamas, and more than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.

Cons

Spencer reported that on Christmas morning 2014, a man drove up to the Islamic Cultural Center in Fresno, California, threw rocks through windows and vandalized the inside. The incident was immediately called a "anti-Muslim hate crime," but it turned out that the culprit was a Muslim, Asif Mohammad Khan.

CAIR also lent its name to a Youtube video purporting to show the harassment of two young Muslim men in traditional attire by the New York Police Department. But the episode never happened, and CAIR said it was “demanding an apology” from the producers of the video.

In June 2014, three burned Qurans were found in front of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Michigan. The mosque’s imam, Sheik Husham Al-Husainy, proposed a statute criminalizing the desecration of holy books. But the culprit was a Muslim named Ali Hassan Al-Assadi.

In April 2014, at Montclair State University in New Jersey, a Muslim student claimed that three white men in jeans and hoodies assaulted him and called him an “Islamic terrorist.” Campus police, however, determined the incident was a hoax, finding a student named Navjoat Aulakh had filed a false report.

The same month, in El Cajon, California, the murder of a hijab-wearing woman, Shaima Alawadi, was widely reported as an “Islamophobic hate crime." A note was found on Alawadi’s body that read, “Go back to your country, you terrorist.” A campaign, “One Million Hijabs for Shaima Alawadi," was launched.

The well-known Iranian-American write Reza Aslan bashed Spencer and colleague Pamela Geller in an expletive-laden tweet, blaming them for the murder of Alawadi.

But the culprit turned out to be Alawadi's husband, Kassim Alhimidi, who was found guilty of murdering her after she asked for a divorce.

Rule of Islam

CAIR long had accused WND and others of "smearing" the Muslim group by citing a newspaper account of CAIR founder Omar Ahmad telling Muslims in Northern California in 1998 that they were in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam's rule over the country.

But WND caught CAIR falsely claiming that it had contacted the paper and had "sought a retraction," insisting Ahmad never made the statement.

In a telephone conversation with WND in 2003, CAIR's communications director, Ibrahim Hooper, insisted someone from CAIR’s California affiliate made the contact with the paper.

When confronted with the fact that the newspaper’s editors had told WND that CAIR had not contacted them and that the reporter stood by the story, Hooper abruptly ended the call, saying: “If you are going to use distortions, I can’t stop you; it’s a free country. Have a nice day.”

Minutes later, however, Hooper called back and said he wanted to change his statement to say, “We will seek a retraction, and we have spoken to the reporter about it in the past.”

But three years later, the issue arose again, and WND found CAIR still had not contacted the paper.

Hooper, himself, also has expressed a desire to overturn the U.S. system of government in favor of an Islamic state.

"I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education."

FBI wiretap evidence from the terror-funding Holy Land Foundation case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR's parent organization, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a "media twinkle" to the Muslim leaders' agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.

CAIR has complained of the unindicted co-conspirator designation, but as WND reported in 2010, a federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group has been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas."