Stop Rewarding CAIR
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group,” despite the fact that only a small percentage of American Muslims say the organization represents their interests. Yet, the organization has been able to position itself as such and reap the benefits of this deception.
Two stories caught our eye today in which CAIR comes off as an anti-racist organization and gains monetary reward for it as well.
- As reported in The American Spectator, the CEO of MGM Resorts International, Jim Murren, sent a letter to his employees in the wake of the “events in Charlottesville and Barcelona” telling them “we must stand strongly in defiance of violence, bigotry and anything that threatens our precious right to equality.”
Murren then announced that MGM Resorts would match any donations that its employees made to a number of organizations he deemed were fighting this fight. Among the organizations was CAIR, ironically a Muslim Brotherhood front group that, as Islamists and supporters of Hamas, promotes the kind of bigotry and hate Murren is objecting to (and even the same ideology to which the Barcelona terrorists ascribed).
- To avoid a lawsuit on a copyright infringement case involving the cartoon character Pepe the Frog, an author who illegally used the Pepe character agreed to shut down any further distribution of his book. Since his book was also perceived by some to be anti-Muslim, one of the conditions of the settlement was that he donate whatever proceeds he had already made from the book to CAIR.
Both of these cases indicate, at best, woeful ignorance or, at worse, how the radical left, in concert with the Islamists, has managed to mainstream its insidious agenda.
And for the Islamists, that agenda includes the installation of sharia (Islamic) law as the law of the land.
Indeed, this is what CAIR promotes.
- In September 2014, CAIR endorsed a letter opposing the Islamic State terrorist group’s tactics, but endorsed sharia governance’s brutal hudud punishments, the recreation of a caliphate and the Islamist doctrine of gradualism. It even implied that journalists that are viewed as dishonest are acceptable targets for violence.
- CAIR spokesperson Ibrahim Hooper is on record as saying, “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 also said that sharia law would replace the U.S. Constitution if Muslims became the majority in the U.S.
- In 2007, the U.S. government designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which was successfully prosecuted for financing Hamas (a terrorist organization as designated by the U.S., among others).
- Two years later, a U.S. District Court judge upheld this designation because of “ample evidence” linking CAIR to Hamas.
- In a 2007 court filing, federal prosecutors stated, “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”
- In 2014, the United Arab Emirates banned CAIR as a terrorist group.
We would urge those who wish to fight “violence, bigotry and anything that threatens our precious right to equality” as well as those who wish to counter anti-Muslim bigotry to do their homework and not throw away their money to organizations such as CAIR.
Rather, they should invest in any number of anti-Islamist and reformist Muslim organizations that are truly fighting for these very same values.