Part 9: Leaders' Statements Illustrate CAIR's Extremism, Anti-Semitism

by Steven Emerson
IPT News
April 3, 2008

http://www.investigativeproject.org/637/leaders-statements-illustrate-cairs-extremism-anti-semitism

(Note: To read today's full installment, click here http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/120.pdf)

Repeated statements by CAIR's leaders illustrate the group's extremist and anti-Semitic positions.

Today's installment in the Investigative Project on Terrorism's detailed analysis of the self-proclaimed civil rights group, the ninth in a series, presents a compilation of those statements.

Here are some of the highlights:

• CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper is on record as supporting financial assistance to the families of "martyrs." Reporting in 2002 on tens of millions of dollars that Saudi Arabia had paid to the families of Palestinians killed or injured during the Intifada -- including the families of suicide bombers -- United Press International quoted Hooper as saying that the Islamic faith enjoins Muslims to take care of widows and especially orphans, and that the families of suicide bombers are just as needy as those killed by military attacks.

Hooper was further quoted as challenging critics to "give us a list of Palestinian widows and orphans so Muslims can comply with dictates of not feeding the wrong people," and asking, "Are you supposed to penalize some child, some widow, because of what their father did or did not do?"

• Hussam Ayloush, the director of CAIR-Southern California, has used the term "zionazi" to describe Israeli Jews. "Indeed," he wrote in e-mail correspondence, "the zionazis are a bunch of nice people; just like their nazi brethren! It is just that the world keeps making up lies about them! It is so unfair."

• CAIR has routinely claimed that Jews control the U.S. government and push an anti-Muslim foreign policy. Executive Director Nihad Awad told a Muslim Students Association audience in 1998, for example, to ponder the Jewish origin of many Clinton administration officials.

"Who is opposing the latest agreement with Iraq?" Awad asked. "Look at their names. Look at their ethnic, their ethnic or religious or racial background…. These are the same people who are pushing the United States to go to war on behalf of a third party, and they are the same people who are opposing the peace process," he said.

At a "Meet Your Congressman" event two months later, Omar Ahmad, CAIR's founding chairman, declared that "Muslims in the U.S. are willing to be a catalyst to unite the Muslim world with Washington. It is the Israeli lobby that is demonizing Islam."

Again, in August 2001, CAIR-NY circulated an open letter addressed to President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell asserting that "political intimidation by the domestic Zionist and pro-Israeli lobbying groups should never prevent the U.S., a ‘superpower,' from upholding the basic standards of international law and human rights."

• On a web page that he published while a graduate student in the mid-1990s, Ahmed Rehab, now CAIR-Chicago's executive director, challenged Holocaust history, calling it "the established opinions of the able Jewish historians regarding the details of the holocaust." Non-Jews, he suggested, would be "less likely to be biased and non-objectively sympathetic."

• CAIR has invited the Rev. William Baker, a neo-Nazi, to speak at multiple events, and attacked those, like the Anti-Defamation League, who pointed out Baker's history. In Theft of as Nation, published in 1982, Baker wrote that "all Jews who entered Palestine during the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948 and after the establishment of the state of Israel should return to the various countries of their origin" and also that the "Zionist state of Israel . . . should be dismantled and eventually eliminated."

• CAIR has repeatedly defended Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a vehemently anti-Semitic leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Qatar.

The Associated Press quoted Qaradawi in 1998 as writing, "There should be no dialogue with these people [Israelis] except with swords," the Los Angeles Times in 2001 as referring to suicide bombings as "heroic martyrdom operations."

Yet Ayloush referred to him as a "scholar" at the 2002 Orange County CAIR fundraiser. CAIR Legal Director Arsalan Iftikhar echoed that characterization in a 2005 interview on MSNBC -- even after Qaradawi had ruled it a religious duty for Muslims to fight Americans in Iraq, including civilians -- and claimed that Qaradawi "has said unequivocally that people who commit suicide bombing… and acts of terror are completely outside the bounds of Islam."

• CAIR officials been quoted as expressing their desire for establishment of an Islamic government in the United States.

For example, the San Ramon Valley Herald reported Ahmad as telling a gathering of California Muslims in 1998, "The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth." Although CAIR denied that Ahmad made the remark and claimed that it was seeking a retraction, the paper was never contacted.

• CAIR has pursued free distribution of a Saudi-approved version of the Koran that the Los Angeles School district had banned from use in local schools as being anti-Semitic.

• CAIR has consistently opposed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the normalization of relations between Israel and the Palestinians. In a 1999 interview, for example, Ahmad rejected the peace process as "a security arrangement in which the stronger party (Israel), backed by the U.S., is getting the most and the weaker party (Palestinians) are forced to accept whatever is thrown at them."

Again, to see today's full installment, click here http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/120.pdf

Related Topics: Steven Emerson