CAIR and Lawfare: an Interview with Brooke Goldstein

by Jerry Gordon (May 2014)

unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas,Texas. CAIR and the other groups were found to have funneled tens of millions in funds  to Hamas. As the month began a CAIR spokesperson attacked the Clarion Project film, the fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a member of The Future of Diplomacy Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Ahere.

Making of a Martyr, concerning the indoctrination of Palestinian children at UN-sponsored schools in the West Bank and Gaza. That is a mean of recruiting them as state sponsored suicide bombers and human shields. Goldstein is the founder and director of the Children’s Rights Institute (CRI), “a nonprofit organization whose mission is to track, spotlight, and legally combat violations of children's basic human rights around the world.” She has been a frequent commentator on these topics at FoxNews, CNN and in columns of the New York Sun, New York Daily News, and Commentary among other media outlets. Goldstein was the 2007 recipient of the E. Nathaniel Gates Award for Outstanding Public Advocacy and the 2009 Inspire! Award bestowed by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Against this background we interviewed Ms. Goldstein.

sentenced to one year in federal prison for violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq. Communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR, Randall Todd Royer, trained with Lashkar-I-Taiba, an al Qaeda-tied Kashmir organization and was sentenced to twenty years in prison after being indicted for conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban kill US soldiers in Afghanistan. CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad was arrested and deported for working as Executive Director of the Global Relief Foundation, an organization that financed al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Abdurahman Alamoudi, one of CAIR's former directors, is a supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, and is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for terrorism-related convictions. CAIR’s Community Affairs Director, Bassem Khafagi, who has publicly encouraged Muslims to carry out suicide bombings within the U.S., pled guilty to fraud and was deported to Egypt for facilitating the transfer of funds to terrorism. Ghassan Elashi, a founding Board member of CAIR's Texas chapter, was convicted of providing material support to state sponsors of terrorism and knowingly doing business with Hamas, to which he illegally transferred more than $12.4 million dollars. Not surprisingly, CAIR characterized Elashi’s indictment as “a war on Islam and Muslims.”

Tides Foundation. It  enjoys access to American public schools. It masquerades as a tax exempt “charitable” organization while enjoying regular access to media outlets. As Senator Jon Kyl aptly noted, CAIR’s Saudi backing and aggressive tactics have effectively “forced out” moderate American Muslims from public dialogue, replacing them instead with a terror-connected institution who claims to speak for them but doesn’t, and levels charges of “Islamophobia” at anyone who does.

“bullying legislation”national legislation, Goldstein:  I think that we need to support law enforcement, as they apply the law equally to all children and women regardless of their race, their national origin, their ethnicity, or their religion. Children are innocent. I did a movie about the abuse of children by Islamist terrorists called The Making of a Martyr where I exposed the illegal indoctrination and recruitment of innocent Palestinian children to become suicide-homicide bombers and how they are used as human shields by terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. I pointed out that, despite the fact that this crime is widespread, it is ongoing and occurring out in the open, no human rights group—from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch—has consistently and coherently condemned this practice as a form of child abuse. In 2004, when I started filming my movie, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers actually came out with a report denying that Palestinian terrorist groups recruit children for armed activities. This was a slap in the face to these children who are being abused and who deserve protection, and this is what I call the real Islamophobia. It amounts to turning a blind eye, by the human rights community and by politicians, to the plight of Muslim women and children, basically sending a green light to radical Islamists to abuse them. Such a blind eye sends the message: Go ahead, continue abusing Muslim children and women with impunity, we don't care, they don’t deserve human rights. That is the real Islamophobia  Being irrationally scared of advocating for Muslim women’s equal rights. The real Islamophobes think we will not raise awareness about this issue because we are too afraid to do so. We are too politically correct and we are afraid of being called “anti-Muslim” even when the charge is ridiculous on its face. When New York Congressman Peter King held his radicalization hearings and put Somali Americans on the stand—who testified with tears in their eyes about how their Somali American relatives and children were being practically kidnapped by Al-Shabaab, flown across the border, and trained as Mujahideen abroad—Rep. King was called an Islamophobe for advocating that the human rights of the Somali American community be protected. When ABC Family Channel recently announced a series, Alice in Arabia, about an American who was kidnapped and taken to Saudi Arabia, CAIR bullied and intimidated ABC into dropping the series. We have Hezbollah’s Al Manar TV network and Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV, both run by designated terrorist groups that engage in the recruitment of Muslim children and target Muslim women under very brutal interpretations of Sharia law. Both networks, Al Aqsa and Al Manar, are unlawfully being broadcast within the United States by corporations like NileSat IPTV, based in New Jersey, and by ArabTV4All, based in California. They air daily sermons from radical Islamists and cartoons and television programs that teach children to engage in violent activities. They are airing such jihadi recruitment propaganda in this country, illegally, and nothing is being done about it. We are complicit by turning a blind eye to these issues because we are allowing this to continue within our borders without a real coordinated law enforcement response and, when law enforcement does respond, they are crippled by political correctness.

Goldstein:  Thank you. I also want to mention a book that came out by Citizens for National Security. It is called the Council of American Islamic Relations: Its Use of Lawfare and Intimidation. It contains examples of attempts by CAIR to bully and sue Americans and U.S. law enforcement into silence. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to study CAIR's role in undermining the First Amendment right of free speech and our national security. The Lawfare Project also published a book entitled Lawfare: The War Against Free Speech. It is a guide for any American who wants a primer on what their free speech rights are in this country, what the First Amendment protects, what is considered defamation, and how to protect yourself against a lawfare lawsuit. Your readers should feel free to contact The Lawfare Project if they are being intimidated. You can visit our website at www.thelawfareproject.org. Thank you so much Jerry for giving this issue the attention it deserves. We appreciate it.

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