More Evidence of CAIR Links to Terrorism By Andrew L. Jaffee, September 29, 2003	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

More evidence surfaced last Thursday of CAIR's (The Council on American Islamic Relations) links to terrorism. CAIR's former civil rights coordinator Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer was served with charges that he "...conspired to provide material support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and to his Taliban protectors in Afghanistan," according to the Washington Post. Royer had already been arrested and charged on on June 27 for "...conspiring to join a Muslim extremist terror group that has been blamed for thousands of deaths in the disputed Kashmir territory of India and Pakistan," according to ABC.

Thursday's charges added to a long list of evidence that CAIR has ties to terrorist groups. Siraj Wahhaj, one of CAIR's advisory board members, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. Nihad Awad, CAIR’s Executive Director, has declared himself a supporter of Hamas and the PLO, which are both on the official U.S. list of terrorist organizations. And Bassem Khafagi, CAIR's director of community relations, "was arrested by the FBI in January in connection with a terror-financing front group he helped found that is allegedly tied to both Iraq and al Qaeda."

Despite all this evidence, FBI Director Robert Mueller thinks groups like CAIR and the AMC (American Muslim Council) are "mainstream." According to WorldNetDaily:

Mueller and other top FBI officials have met subsequently with the AMC and other high-profile Washington groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, that claim to be mainstream but seem to antiterrorism specialists to be more opposed to the FBI's efforts to fight terrorism than to the terrorists themselves.

The FBI says it holds such meetings to build relations with Arab-American and Muslim communities. But some of its interlocutors are using those relations against the FBI's counterterrorism efforts, say careful observers of the Wahhabi lobby. Representatives of those groups reportedly have used these high-profile meetings to credentialize themselves while serving as character witnesses for terrorism suspects arrested by the FBI. In one case, the activists defended suspected Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian, the former University of South Florida professor arrested earlier this year under a 50-count terrorism indictment. For the previous two years, Al-Arian was the lobbying coordinator at the AMC conventions, working to organize efforts on Capitol Hill to weaken U.S. antiterrorism laws, according to the programs of the 2000 and 2001 AMC conferences.

Now Mueller intends to give Imad Hamad FBI's Exceptional Public Service Award. According to the New York Post:

Born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hamad came to America decades ago. But the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suspected him of being a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), responsible for countless homicide bombings and the October 2001 assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi. It so opposed Hamad's presence in the United States that it fought to deport him for over two decades. ...

Since then, as Midwest Regional Director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), Hamad has been busy promoting the terrorist cause - doing interviews throughout the Detroit area supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic hate.

In a 2002 broadcast on Detroit's FOX affiliate, Hamad supported a Palestinian Authority TV "Sesame Street"-style program that urges Palestinian children to kill Jews and Christians and encourages them to become homicide bombers. Hamad called the program "patriotic."

And Hamad has opposed virtually every arrest and conviction of Islamic terrorists.

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