The Washington Post Gets CAIR-Less, Again

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) portrays itself as a U.S. civil rights organization. However, as numerous terrorist analysts and the U.S. government itself has noted, CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2009 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) retrial, the largest terrorism financing case in the country’s history. Yet, The Washington Post has frequently failed to disclose CAIR’s history.

The Post’s “Hate crimes against Muslims hit highest mark since 2001” (November 14) by reporter Matt Zapotosky, quoted Ibrahim Hooper, a CAIR spokesman, who claimed that anti-Muslim rhetoric was responsible for an increase in hate crimes. Zapotosky did not, however, inform readers about relevant information regarding Hooper, other CAIR employees, or CAIR itself.

As a CAMERA Washington Times Op-Ed pointed out (“CAIR’s cries of ‘Islamophobia,’” Aug. 9, 2016), at least five former staff or lay leaders from CAIR have been indicted, arrested or deported on weapons or terrorism-related charges. In an out of court settlement with the website www.anti-cair-net.org, the council did not contest assertions that it was founded by Hamas members, founded by Islamic terrorists and was funded by Hamas supporters. Hamas is a U.S.-designated terrorist group that rules the Gaza Strip. The movement’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the genocide of Jews.

CAMERA has made The Post aware of CAIR’s history via several unpublished letters to the editor and in correspondence to the papers’ reporters. CAMERA has sent it’s Special Report “The Council on American Islamic Relations: Civil Rights or Extremism?” (July 2009) which noted, among other things, CAIR’s connections to the HLF retrial. Additionally, CAMERA has sent The Post documents such as FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers’ statement to members of the U.S. Congress, which stated that the bureau was ceasing official cooperation with CAIR or its executives until it could resolve “whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and Hamas.”

Nonetheless, The Post often omits CAIR’s background (see, for example “Washington Post CAIR Cover-Up Fails Readers,” CAMERA, May 3, 2016). The decision to trust Hooper’s claims regarding rampant Islamophobia is questionable. As CAMERA’s Special Report highlighted, “critics have charged that the council has shown a tendency to embellish statistics about hate crimes” against Muslims. The historian Daniel Pipes, a former U.S. State and Defense Department employee, has noted “an earlier CAIR hate crimes report in 2005…discovered that of twenty “anti-Muslim hate crimes” in 2004 that CAIR cited, at least six are invalid.”

Hooper has made several curious statements in the past, which Post readers should have been appraised of. For example, he was quoted as saying that he “would not want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”

Other CAIR officials have made similarly outrageous statements. The organization’s executive director, Nihad Awad, stated in 1994, “I am in support of Hamas.”

Indeed, a mere five days before The Post’s latest uncritical CAIR quotation, the head of the council’s Los Angeles office, Hussam Ayloush, made a questionable statement in response to news that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Ayloush took to Twitter, tweeting “Ok, repeat after me: Al-Shaab yureed isqat al-nizaam. (Arab Spring chant). As Pipes noted in National Review Online, the second line of Ayloush’s tweet is Arabic for “The people wants to bring down the regime.” “In other words,” Pipes said, “Ayloush unambiguously and directly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.”

Pipes hoped that Ayloush’s tweet would “help awaken the press to CAIR’s true Islamist identity.” Early returns, however, aren’t encouraging.

(Note: An earlier version of this post stated that Pipes was a consultant to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense. In fact, he was an employee.)