by Srdja Trifkovic
5 September 2006
http://www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
We’ve learned with two months’ delay that on June 21 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security took officials of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) on a behind-the-screens tour of U.S. airport security measures at O’Hare International in Chicago. During the tour Customs and Border Patrol agents outlined their high-risk passenger lookout system to the guests. The decision to take Muslim activists to point-of-entry and Customs stations, secondary screening and interview rooms at America’s busiest airport was made in response to CAIR’s complaints that Muslims were being unfairly targeted for scrutiny on arrival in the United States. This is not the first time CAIR was able to intimidate American institutions into compliance with its dictates, but it is by far the most alarming such incident to date.
Brian Humphrey, Director of Field Operations at O’Hare, assured his guests that agents do not target Muslim passengers for special screening and explained that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are obliged to complete an interactive cultural sensitivity course. The course, which teaches agents, inter alia, that Muslims believe jihad is an inner struggle against one’s sinful desires, was developed by Margaret Nydell, professor of Arabic at Georgetown University and the author of Understanding Arabs, a notable piece of Islamophile apologia. Professor Nydell’s are of special interest and expertise is Saudi Arabia. Perhaps it should be added that Georgetown’s Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy is lavishly funded by Saudi money and that its head is one of the world’s leading apologists of jihad, Dr. John Esposito.
Nydell’s instruction and CBP’s companion training manual and video, were described as “politically correct drivel” by a Customs and Border Protection supervisor: “It’s all about how Islam means peace and tolerance,” he told WorldNetDaily. “We’re told how to deal with Arabs and Muslims, that they are loving people and not terrorists. That jihad is struggle with sin and has nothing to do with violence.” Customs agents involved in the CAIR tour at O’Hare told the same source that they were outraged that sensitive counterterrorism procedures were revealed to an organization tainted with terrorist links.
CAIR claims to be “just another civil-rights group,” devoted to protecting the rights of Muslims and promoting a better understanding of Islam in America, but there is more, much more, than meets the eye:
—Ihsan Bagby, a founding Board member of CAIR, maintained that Muslims “can never be full citizens of this country [the U.S.] . . . because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”
—Shortly after it was founded with foreign Arab money in 1994, CAIR called the guilty verdict in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case “a travesty of justice” and a proof of the all-pervasive “Islamophobia” in the American society.
—In 1995 CAIR condemned the conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, for conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks, as a “hate crime.”
—CAIR advisory-board member Siraj Wahhaj was named in 1995 as one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the scheme to blow up New York City sites in 1993.
—In July 1998 CAIR’s chairman of the board, Omar Ahmad, declared that the Kuran should be America’s highest authority and that Islam is not in America to be equal to any other religion, but to be dominant.
—In August 1998 CAIR condemned the targeting of terrorist training camps in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
—In October 1998 CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama as “the sworn enemy.”
—That same year CAIR denied bin Laden’s responsibility for the twin East African embassy bombings.
—In November 1999, at a Muslim youth rally in Chicago, Omar Ahmad praised suicide bombers: “Fighting for freedom, fighting for Islam—that is not suicide.”
—After 9-11 CAIR called for donations: under a picture of the flaming Towers the hyperlink took donors to the website of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity whose assets were frozen soon thereafter by the Treasury Department. On July 27, 2004, a federal grand jury in Dallas, Texas, returned a 42 count indictment against the HLF that included conspiracy, material support to a foreign terrorist organization, and money laundering.
—A week later CAIR called on people to donate to the Global Relief Foundation, another Islamic charity from Illinois, whose assets were also frozen in December 2001, and which has provided assistance to known Islamic terrorist groups.
—In December 2002 CAIR called the closure of the Holy Land Foundation “unjust” and “disturbing.”
—CAIR claimed the closure of the Global Relief Foundation was due to the racial profiling of a group that “had established a track record of effective relief work.”
—In 2002 CAIR embarked on a campaign to place a package of pro-Islamic books and CDs in thousands of American libraries. It claimed the program was not subsidized from abroad, but kept quiet about $1/2m donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud
—which gave a Wahabi seal of approval on the materials.
—In 2003 CAIR complained about the FBI surveillance of mosques, but remained mute when it was revealed that the Al-Farooq mosque in New York was complicit in collecting funds for al-Qaeda. Undeterred, it has continued to demand amendments to the USA Patriot Act to protect the Muslims from eavesdropping.
—In September 2003 Bassem Khafagi, CAIR’s community relations director, pleaded guilty to lying on his visa application and was deported.
—After the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid, Ibrahim Hooper said a Muslim convert in Florida who allegedly had her hijab pulled by Spanish tourists “is also victim of terrorism.” Adolf [sic] Ali, head of CAIR Florida, insisted that Florida should reinstate the electric chair for “kuffars [infidel] accused of causing offense to Muslims.”
—In April 2005, the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR, Ghassan Elashi was found guilty of supporting terrorism. He was the third CAIR-connected figure to be convicted on federal terrorism charges since 9-11.
—Also in April 2005, CAIR orchestrated a nation-wide campaign to have my book The Sword of the Prophet banned from the National Review Online bookstore.
—in August 2005 when WMAL, a Washington, D.C. talk radio station, succumbed to CAIR’s pressure and fired presenter Michael Graham for his comments on the link between Islam and terrorism.
—In April 2006 a federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of a $2 million defamation lawsuit by CAIR against former U.S. Rep. Cass Ballenger. The suit was filed in response to an October 2003 interview in which Ballenger said CAIR raised funds for terrorists and did so “with actual malice, wrongful and willful intent to injure and with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity.”
This is only a partial list, and it is likely to be enriched in the months and years to come. And yet, in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, CAIR’s lading PR duet—Palestinian-born Nihad Awad and American-born Ibrahim Hooper
—were invited to the White House. When receiving them President Bush may have been unaware that CAIR’s condemnation of the attacks was delayed, and only came in December of that year. Until that time it had referred to the “alleged attackers,” implying that someone other than the named 19 were the real culprits.
CAIR’s medium-term agenda became apparent in May 2004, when it issued a report claiming that anti-Muslim incidents in the United States had increased by almost 70 percent in 2003. The study “outlined”—euphemism for superficial or fraudulent research—over a thousand “incidents and experiences of anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment.” (The word “experience” denotes an entirely subjective view of a situation or event that could not be pumped up into an “incident.”) Claiming that “hate crimes” alone had jumped by 121 percent, CAIR demanded a public inquiry into post-9/11 policies impacting the Muslim community, legislative actions to curb the use of profiling by law enforcement agencies, strengthening of hate crime prosecutions, and “modifications” to the Patriot Act to end “abuses” of the Muslim community.
With that “report” and the associated demands, reflected in the campaign to censor books and media outlets uncomfortable to jihad, the true agenda of CAIR is finally clear. It is a radical political group that does not merely want to change the nature of discourse on Islam in America, it wants to Islamize America. It wants to transform America into a barren wasteland of mind-numbing uniformity of thought, on par with Saudi Arabia and Mauritania. Messrs. Awad and Hooper are not Islamic community activists seeking to better the lot of their co-religionists, they are political visionaries who want the U.S. government to be Islamic “sometime in the future.”
Emboldened by the lack of moral fiber in the host-society that they despise, with each victory CAIR activists become ever more cocky. Arsalan Iftikhar, national legal director for CAIR, thus promised in September 2005 that it was time for everyday Muslims to “defend the image and reputation of the community and Islam in general”: “I am here to teach you how the American Muslim community can legally empower itself to protect itself in the American courts.”
It is high time to turn the tables and use the courts against CAIR. It has been playing its pernicious game far too long, and needs a healthy dose of the law itself—and the law is clear:
Whoever provides material support or resources or conceals or disguises the nature, location, source, or ownership of material support or resources, knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out [terrorist acts] . . . shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both, and, if the death of any person results, shall be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.
There is a clear link between CAIR and persons and institutions with terrorist connections, and it defies belief that such an organization is still allowed to operate—let alone to be given VIP tours of America’s border defenses by the Department of Homeland Security.
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