America’s wealthiest community foundation, with more than $8 billion in assets, has donated a total of more than $330,000 to two U.S.-based Islamic groups determined by the United Arab Emirates to be terrorist organizations.
The donations by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Islamic Relief are the targets of a national campaign by the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum.
MEF, led by Daniel Pipes, a noted writer and commentator on Islamic supremacist movements, is calling for immediate termination of the foundation’s funding for the Muslim groups in a Change.org petition.
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, or SVCF, is “the go-to charitable organization for some of America’s wealthiest philanthropists,” the petition notes.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a $500 million dollar donation to the foundation in 2013.
MEF said it privately contacted SVCF last month and presented evidence of CAIR’s and Islamic Relief’s extremist ties. SVCF leaders, however, “refused to discuss the matter” and “engaged in a flurry of ad hominem attacks on the Forum,” Israel National News reported.
MEF said it’s “unconscionable that such a leading institution as SVCF, which claims to support ‘understanding and tolerance,’ should help organizations that rely on ignorance and hatred.”
“To be precise, CAIR and Islamic Relief have a long history of providing platforms to speakers who denigrate and threaten women, Jews, Christians, the LGBTQ community, and Muslims belonging to minority sects,” MEF said.
CAIR has sued the authors of a WND Books expose, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” which documented the group’s radical ties. A trial in the case is expected to commence this fall.
CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to fund the terrorist group Hamas, and both CAIR and Islamic Relief were designated as terrorist organizations by the United Arab Emirates in 2014, along with groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida.
According to evidence entered in the Justice Department’s Hamas-financing case, CAIR was founded by figures associated with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the worldwide movement that has stated its intent to transform the U.S. into an Islamic state. The case prompted the FBI to cut off its cooperative relationship with CAIR. More than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.
Commitment to diversity and tolerance?
In its petition, the Middle East Forum cites regular speakers at CAIR and Islamic Relief events who have rationalized honor killings and wife-beating and advocated the death penalty for homosexuals.
“It should not be politically divisive to state that these ideas are incompatible with SVCF’s self-proclaimed commitment to diversity and tolerance,” MEF says.
MEF also charges that through its funding, SVCF is “legitimizing Islamists as leaders of American Islam,” enabling them “to speak on behalf of ordinary Muslims.”
While CAIR has complained of the unindicted co-conspirator designation, 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.”
In the ongoing lawsuit CAIR filed against the WND authors in 2009, 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.