Hamas, CAIR, and American Muslims

The anti-Jewish hatred of Hamas has only intensified since the publication of the Covenant in 1988. A few examples will illustrate this trend.

Top Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar asserted in 2010, both in speeches and in a book, that the Jews have deserved and provoked all the persecutions and expulsions they have suffered down through the millennia, e.g. at the hands of the Egyptian pharaoh, European Christians, and Adolph Hitler. Al-Zahar has the following message for the Jews: “there is no place for you among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed for annihilation.”[8]

Mahmoud al-Zahar’s claim that the Jews deserved what Hitler did to them has in fact become common among Islamists.[9] Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, “easily one of the most admired and best-known representatives of Sunni Islam today,”[10] accepted as the highest religious authority by Hamas and the global Muslim Brotherhood,[11] has also asserted that Hitler meted out divinely sanctioned punishment to the Jews and has called for Muslims to impose a similar punishment, calling openly for genocide (“kill them, down to the very last one”).[12] Qaradawi has also said that the Jews of today bear responsibility for their forefathers’ crime against Jesus,[13] and he has given a detailed Islamic legal justification for the indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilians for which Hamas has become famous, in effect presenting a shariah-based case for genocide.[14]

On the official Hamas TV station, the Hamas Deputy Minister for Religious Endowments Abdallah Jarbu in 2010 denied the humanity of the Jews, described them as microbes, and called upon Allah to “annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience.”[15]

Hamas author Mukhlis Barzaq writes that the fate of the Jews should be “complete killing, total extermination and eradicating perdition,” and even in Hamas’ children’s publication al-Fatih one can find the prayer, “O God exterminate the Jews the tyrannical usurpers.”[16] A children’s program on the official Hamas TV station on May 2, 2014 featured the host interviewing a little girl who said she wished to be a police officer when she grows up, “so that I can shoot Jews.” The host responded “All the Jews? All of them?” to which the girl responded, “Yes,” and the host answered, “Good.”[17] Dozens more examples of extreme Jew-hatred from Hamas officials and Hamas media outlets, including explicit incitement of genocide, are given in this footnote.[18]

All of the above examples come from Hamas leaders and official Hamas media outlets. They therefore represent exactly the message that Hamas wants to convey in Arabic to its Palestinian and other supporters. Recent scholarship on Hamas stresses the great importance that Hamas attaches to its extensive media operations. Hamas “has an entire propaganda division at its disposal, including television stations, such as Al Aqsa TV, multiple radio bands, newspapers, and Internet sites.” Hamas also spreads its “messages of indoctrination throughout its vast social welfare networks.”[19] The gist of Hamas propaganda is that Jews are out to destroy Islam and are the source of all corruption on earth and that the battle with Israel is thus a cosmic struggle against Satanic evil in which no compromise is possible. Peaceful coexistence beside a Jewish state is unthinkable and the only solution is to kill all the Jews. The genocidal implications of Hamas rhetoric are as clear as they could possibly be.

The Founding of CAIR

Thanks to the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007-8, the largest terrorist financing trial in U.S. history, a huge amount of evidence on Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood operations in the U.S. has become available to the public.[20] In what follows, I will use the meticulous scholarship of Lorenzo Vidino to trace the origins of CAIR, based on the evidence collected by federal law enforcement officials in the investigation that led up to the trial.[21]

After the formation of Hamas in 1987, Muslim Brotherhood groups all over the world mobilized in its support. In 1988, the head of the Palestine section of the Muslim Brotherhood traveled to the U.S. and met with fellow Muslim Brothers. The result was the formation of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood in America, dominated by Brotherhood members of Palestinian origin and headed by Musa Abu Marzook (currently a top Hamas official in the Mideast). This committee set up three distinct organizations: the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), the Occupied Land Fund, later renamed the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), and the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR). The HLF would serve as the financial arm and in 2008 would be convicted on funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. An internal memorandum from October 1992 defined the goal of these organizations as being “to liberate its land [Palestine] from the abomination and the defilement of the children of the Jews…”[22]

In 1993, the Oslo accords signaled the beginning of a peace process that was intended to culminate in the “two-state solution.” Hamas, as we have seen, is implacably opposed to the two-state solution, insisting that a single Islamic state in all of historic Palestine, established by violent jihad on the ruins of the Jewish state of Israel, is the only acceptable outcome. The Oslo Accords caused a crisis for the Hamas organizations in the U.S. (a crisis that was made worse by the official designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government in 1995). They could no longer publicly support what was now dubbed a terrorist organization opposed to the Oslo Accords without alienating the American public.[23] The FBI began tapping their phone conversations and meetings, including a special three-day meeting held in 1993 in a Marriott hotel near the Philadelphia airport.

“Attending the meeting,” Vidino writes, “were representatives of the three organizations making up the Palestine Committee.”[24] (One of the officials attending this meeting was Nihad Awad, who remains as of this writing the Executive Director of CAIR and is a self-identified “supporter of the Hamas movement.”[25]) Like Hamas leaders in the Middle East, these men were focused on the task of undermining the Oslo Accords. But they knew that in the U.S. they could not come right out and say they were against the peace process and the two-state solution. In the words of one participant, Omar Ahmed: “If you want to [talk to] the Americans, you lose the Muslims…; if you address the Muslims, it means you cannot reveal your address to the Americans…. If someone asked you if you want to destroy Israel, what are you going to say on TV? If you give an inconclusive response which is like you didn’t answer the question, someone will come to you and tell you you have forsaken your principles.”[26]

Faced with this dilemma, the Hamas officials opted for a two-pronged approach. To non-Muslim American audiences they would speak of democracy and criticize Yassir Arafat and the PLO as tyrants and the Israelis as occupiers of Palestinian land (of course glossing over the fact that they considered every inch of Israel to be “occupied land,” not only the West Bank and Gaza.) However, “Within the Muslim community, the committee should maintain its support for Hamas undeterred, working to aid the organization.”[27] In the words of one speaker, “the most important thing we can provide…is to support Jihad in Palestine….it is the only way if we want to bring the goals of the [Oslo peace] accord to fail [sic].”[28] “The newly created Holy Land Foundation,” Vidino points out, “was to collect funds for Hamas while giving the impression that it was sending them to orphans and needy children.”[29] Meanwhile, within the American Muslim community, the goal would be to fight against anyone who supported peace or compromise with Israel. In the words of one participant, “We don’t want the children of the [American Muslim] community to grow up surrendering to the issue of peace with Jews.”[30]

The Hamas officials at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting knew that they were calling for outright dishonesty. “I swear by Allah that war is deception,” said one, quoting the Prophet Muhammad.[31] “Deceive, camouflage, pretend… Deceive your enemy….politics is a completion of war.”[32] (This kind of duplicity is a standard part of the Muslim Brotherhood modus operandi in Western countries. In a 2004 investigative report on the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S.A., the Chicago Tribune noted: “Documents obtained by the Tribune and translated from Arabic show that the U.S. Brotherhood has been careful to obscure its beliefs from outsiders.”[33]) To better deceive their American audience, the Brotherhood operatives in Philadelphia decided to create a new organization, one whose “Islamic hue is not very conspicuous…. Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag and let’s not be barbaric-talking,”[34] as one participant put it. Vidino writes: “In order to be able to continue their activities in the United States, the participants agreed that a new organization with no evident ties to Hamas and operating in ways that would make it appear moderate should be founded. … Basing their judgment on ample evidence, U.S. authorities have publicly stated they believe that organization to be the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was founded in Washington, D.C. a few months after the Philadelphia meeting.”[35] The top officials of CAIR would include Omar Ahmed, Nihad Awad, Rafeeq Jabar, and Ibrahim Hooper, all former officials of the IAP and most of them participants at the 1993 Philadelphia meeting.[36]

CAIR would go on to achieve remarkable success, with dozens of staffers in its large headquarters only three blocks from the U.S. Capitol and offices all over the country. With abundant foreign funding, “CAIR soon became the de facto representative of the American Muslim community, regularly contacted by media and policy makers on any issue related to Islam.”[37] Vidino continues: “CAIR has also been the only Muslim organization to offer training on Islam to all sorts of public institutions, from the FBI to the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Marine Corps. From the White House all the way down to law enforcement agencies at the local level, CAIR has successfully portrayed itself as a moderate and mainstream Muslim organization with which the government should partner.”[38]

Vidino notes the incongruity – or perhaps “absurdity” would be a better term – of this state of affairs. It is due to a U.S. government terrorist financing case (the largest one in history, leading to convictions on all counts) that we understand so well the roots of CAIR, and yet it is the government that has conferred legitimacy on CAIR, which soon after its founding “became the most important representative of the Muslim community when dealing with the American government.”[39]

And what exactly has the government gotten in return for legitimizing CAIR? As Vidino points out, CAIR has systematically condemned virtually all actions taken by law enforcement agencies in the United States since 9/11, “downplaying the legitimacy of arrests of al Qaeda operatives inside the country, attributing the government’s actions to discrimination, sloppy police work, and ‘a general policy of targeting Muslims because they are Muslims.’”[40] Moreover, “particularly when counterterrorism actions targeted U.S.-based individuals and entities linked to Hamas, CAIR officials suggested that the U.S. government was not engaged in a ‘war on terror’ but rather a ‘war on Islam.’”[41] For example, when the U.S. froze the assets of the HLF in December 2001, CAIR issued a statement calling this “unjust and counterproductive” and suggesting that it constituted “a shift from a war on terrorism to an attack on Islam.”[42] After the arrest of four individuals in Dallas for funding Hamas in December 2002, CAIR Dallas issued a statement asserting that “these charges result from what appears to be a ‘war on Islam and Muslims’ rather than a war on terror.”[43] More recently, at an awards banquet in California on November 8, 2014, CAIR bestowed its “Promoting Justice” award on Sami al-Arian and his family.[44]  Al-Arian is a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a specially designated terrorist group dedicated to the annihilation of Israel. Al-Arian pled guilty to conspiring to fund PIJ in 2006.[45] At the banquet, a CAIR official stated that al-Arian and his family are “at the center of an unjust campaign by the government.” The courageous liberal American Muslim Stephen Schwartz thus has good reason to assert that CAIR is “the most obnoxious front for terrorist apologetics to be found in the United States.”[46]

Conclusion

Anyone with a sound conscience and even a modest capacity for logical thinking who has read this article and studied the sources it cites will be forced to reach several conclusions. First, our public institutions and mainstream media are in the hands of people who refuse to face facts about the real nature and agenda of CAIR. Wittingly or unwittingly, leaders in our government and media are empowering and legitimizing violent, totalitarian, genocidally anti-Semitic enemies of liberal democracy. The Islamists who founded and still control CAIR are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Anyone who refuses to acknowledge and act on this information is either a simpleton who cannot think clearly, a sluggard too lazy to do the necessary research, or a coward who trembles for fear of being called an “Islamophobe.”

Secondly, American Muslims must reflect carefully on why they have been willing, at least passively, to allow a group such as CAIR to step forward and speak in their name. Do they support Hamas, a violently anti-Semitic and totalitarian movement that has played a major role in sabotaging the peace that US leaders have been trying for decades to broker between Israel and the Palestinians? Or do they oppose Hamas and its hateful ideology? If they oppose it, why have so few of them[47] rebelled against a Hamas front in the U.S.A. that claims to speak in their name?