'Muslim Mafia' case moves toward trial

CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad

A federal judge in Washington issued several orders this week in favor of an author and an investigator who are being sued by the Council on American-Islamic Relations for publishing the results of an undercover probe that exposed the D.C.-based Muslim group's radical origins.

The rulings by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, issued Monday, included allowing the defendants to distinguish in court between various CAIR incorporated entities that have been formed since it was established in 1994. Congressional investigators have alleged CAIR is creating shell entities to hide foreign donations in violation of federal law.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

"These rulings underscore the inability of CAIR to use rhetorical tricks to hide their identity," said attorney Daniel Horowitz.

Horowitz is defending former Air Force special agent David Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, whose findings on CAIR were published in the WND Books bestseller "Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America."

Support WND's legal fight to expose the Muslim Brotherhood-Hamas front in the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR filed suit in 2009 claiming conversion, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract, trespass and violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

But in the lawsuit, CAIR does not allege libel or defamation and has never defended itself against the book's claims.

Horowitz has argued that "exposing CAIR as a criminal organization does not give them the right to sue for being exposed in that manner," describing the lawsuit as "a vendetta by CAIR."

Early in the case, Horowitz' legal team demonstrated that CAIR did not even legally exist as the Washington, D.C., corporation it claimed to be, operating a corporate "shell game." The discovery forced CAIR to refile its lawsuit.

Horowitz explained that distinguishing between various CAIR entities will help the jury understand the organization's tactics.

Attorney Daniel Horowitz

"When law enforcement like the IRS start looking at their tax returns, CAIR closes down one entity and opens another," he told WND.

"They like to pretend that CAIR is just a civil rights organization, but it is a many-headed snake, and they can't hide that."

Horowitz said his team is waiting for a schedule to respond to a motion by CAIR that would prohibit the defense from describing in court CAIR's support of terrorism and Islamic supremacism.

The judge did not grant CAIR's motion but instead said she would outline the issues that she wants addressed.

"That will be the real battleground," said Horowitz. "I don't see how CAIR can hide who they are. It affects the credibility of their witnesses."

A date for the trial has not been set.

"I look forward to this trial," Horowitz said.

Among other things, he said, the defense will "expose CAIR as the mastermind of a strategy to subvert the peace process in the Middle East while exploiting the civil rights banner of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."

Exposure of CAIR's founding

Horowitz said that at the trial, he expects to see complete exposure of CAIR's founding by the Muslim Brotherhood, presenting evidence that traces CAIR's support for radical jihadists and its donations from foreign entities.

CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper with CAIR Executive Director and founder Nihad Awad

While CAIR repeatedly has denied it receives foreign support, the covert operation that produced "Muslim Mafia" obtained video footage that captured CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper boasting of his ability to bring in a half-million dollars of "overseas money," including from Saudi Arabia.

Serving as an intern, Chris Gaubatz gathered some 12,000 pages of documents that were headed for a shredder at CAIR's national office in Washington, just three blocks from the U.S. Capitol building. The information published in "Muslim Mafia," co-authored by David Gaubatz and investigative journalist Paul Sperry, demonstrated CAIR's connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that spawned al-Qaida and Hamas and stated in writing its intent to put America under Islamic law and the authority of the Quran.

The trial also will spotlight CAIR's post-9/11 solicitations of funds for 9/11 victims that actually went to Hamas-based groups, and its subversion of the FBI and law enforcement, employing, Horowitz said, "the Muslim civil rights persona the way a wolf wears sheep's clothing."

Horowitz has cautioned that while CAIR doesn't have a case, the Saudi-funded group "can chill the First Amendment by making it so expensive to speak against them that no one can challenge them."

He warned that CAIR "can just keep getting more and more money from overseas and burn out opposition with lawsuits."

The FBI already had cut off ties to CAIR in January 2009 after the group was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case in Texas, the largest terrorism-finance case in U.S. history.

More than a dozen CAIR leaders have been charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes.

FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, 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.

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 had been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas."

In addition, CAIR leaders have made statements affirming the aim of establishing Islamic rule in the United States.

The Islamic organization 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. Three years later, the issue arose again, and WND found CAIR still had not contacted the paper.

CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper also has expressed a desire to replace the U.S. system of government with 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."