Hamas-Tied Hate Group CAIR Demands Alaska Lawmakers Drop Geller as Witness in Anti-Sharia Hearings

• Civil rights group partially funded by the Saudi Wahhabi establishment
• Has numerous ties to extremist Islamic organizations

• Co-founder Nihad Awad asserted at a 1994 meeting at Barry University, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Awad wrote in the Muslim World Monitor that the 1994 trial which had resulted in the conviction of four Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who had perpetrated the previous year’s World Trade Center bombing was “a travesty of justice.”
• On February 2, 1995, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White named CAIR Advisory Board member and New York imam Siraj Wahhaj as one of the “unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators” in Islamic Group leader Omar Abdel Rahman‘s foiled plot to blow up numerous New York City monuments.
• On June 6, 2006, CAIR’s Ohio affiliate held a large fundraiser in honor of Siraj Wahhaj. Following the event, CAIR-Ohio issued a press release heralding the more than $100,000 that Wahhaj had helped raise that evening for the organization’s “civil liberties work.”
• In October 1998, CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama bin Laden as “the sworn enemy.” According to CAIR, this depiction was “offensive to Muslims.”

• In 1998, CAIR denied bin Laden’s responsibility for the two al Qaeda bombings of American embassies in Africa. According to Ibrahim Hooper, the bombings resulted from “misunderstandings of both sides.”

• In September 2003, CAIR’s former Community Affairs Director, Bassem Khafagi, pled guilty to three federal counts of bank and visa fraud and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Federal investigators said that a group Khafagi founded, the Islamic Assembly of North America, had funneled money to activities supporting terrorism and had published material advocating suicide attacks against the United States. Khafagi’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.

• In July 2004, Ghassan Elashi, a founding Board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was convicted along with his four brothers of having illegally shipped computers from their Dallas-area business, InfoCom Corporation, to Libya and Syria, two designated state sponsors of terrorism. That same month, Elashi was charged with having provided more than $12.4 million to Hamas while he was running HLF. In April 2005, Elashi and two of his brothers were also convicted of knowingly doing business with Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook, who was Elashi’s brother-in-law. Elashi’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR, whose Dallas-Fort Worth chapter depicted the Elashis’ indictment as “a war on Islam and Muslims.”

• On September 6, 2001, the day that federal agents first raided Infocom’s headquarters, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad denounced the U.S. government for “tak[ing] us back to the McCarthy era.” 

• FBI wiretap evidence which was introduced during the 2007 trial of the Holy Land Foundation (a trial that explored HLF’s financial ties to Hamas), proved that Nihad Awad had attended a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and operatives who collaborated on a plan to disguise funding for Hamas as charitable donations.

• CAIR co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad was named, in the same 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, as an unindicted co-conspirator with HLF. During the trial, evidence was supplied proving that Ahmad had attended, along with Nihad Awad, the aforementioned 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and operatives. Moreover, prosecutors described Ahmad as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood‘s “Palestine Committee” in America.

• The home of Muthanna al-Hanooti, one of CAIR’s directors, was raided in 2006 by FBI agents in connection with an active terrorism investigation. FBI agents also searched the offices of Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, al-Hanooti’s Michigan- and Washington DC-based consulting firm that investigators suspect to be a front supporting the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq.

  Al-Hanooti is an ethnic Palestinian who, according to a 2001 FBI report, “collected over $6 million for support of Hamas” and attended, along with CAIR and Holy Land Foundation officials, the previously cited Hamas fundraising summit in Philadelphia in 1993. Currently a prayer leader at a Washington-area mosque that aided some of the 9/11 hijackers, he is a relative of Shiek Mohammed al-Hanooti, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Muthanna al-Hanooti formerly helped run an organization called LIFE for Relief and Development, a suspected Hamas terror front whose Michigan offices were raided by the FBI in September 2006, and whose Baghdad office was raided by U.S. troops in 2004.

  In March 2011, al-Hanooti was sentenced to a year in federal prison for violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq. According to the FBI, al-Hanooti also raised more than $6 million for support of Hamas and was present with CAIR and Holy Land Foundation officials at a secret Hamas fundraising summit held in Philadelphia during the 1990s.

• Randall Todd Royer, who served as a communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR, trained with Lashkar-I-Taiba, an al Qaeda-tied Kashmir organization that is listed on the State Department’s international terror list. He was also indicted on charges of conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American troops in Afghanistan. He later pled guilty to lesser firearm-related charges and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.  Royer’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.

• Onetime CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad was arrested on terrorism-related charges and was deported from the United States due to his subsequent work as Executive Director of the Global Relief Foundation, which in October 2002 was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for financing al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.  

• During the 2005 trial of Sami Al-Arian, who was a key figure for Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States, Ahmed Bedier of CAIR’s Florida branch emerged as one of Al-Arian’s most vocal advocates.

• In the aftermath of 9/11, federal agents raided the Washington-area home of CAIR civil rights coordinator Laura Jaghlit as part of a probe into terrorist financing, money laundering and tax fraud. Her husband Mohammed Jaghlit, a director of the Saudi-backed SAAR Foundation, is a suspect in the still-active (as of January 2008) investigation.

• 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.

• Current CAIR board member Nabil Sadoun co-founded, along with Mousa Abu Marzook, the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which investigators consider to be a key Hamas front in America. Sadoun now sits on UASR’s board.

• Current CAIR research director Mohamed Nimer previously served as a Board Director for UASR.

• One of CAIR’s founding directors, Rafeeq Jaber, is a supporter of Hezbollah and served as the longtime President of the Islamic Association for Palestine.

• CAIR Board member Hamza Yusuf was investigated by the FBI shortly after 9/11 because, just two days before the attacks, he had told a Muslim audience: “This country [the U.S.] is facing a terrible fate and the reason for that is because this country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did. And lest people forget, Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands.”

The foregoing affiliations have drawn the notice of numerous commentators:

• Steven Pomerantz, the FBI’s former chief of counter-terrorism, has stated that “CAIR, its leaders and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.”

• WorldNetDaily quotes an FBI veteran as saying: “Their [CAIR’s] offices have been a turnstile for terrorists and their supporters.”

• The family of John P. O’Neill, Sr., the former FBI counter-terrorism chief who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having “been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism” responsible for the September 11 attacks.

• Terrorism expert Steven Emerson, citing federal law enforcement sources and internal documents, characterizes CAIR as “a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas.”

• U.S. Senator Richard Durbin has said, “CAIR is unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.”

• On September 17, 2003, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer stated that CAIR co-founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad have “intimate links with Hamas.” He later remarked that “we know [CAIR] has ties to terrorism.”

• According to U.S. Rep. Sue Myrick (R – North Carolina), co-founder of the House Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus: “Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”

• During September 2003 hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, Chairman Jon Kyl noted the connections between such groups as CAIR and the Saudi government, stating: “A small group of organizations based in the U.S. with Saudi backing and support is well advanced in its four-decade effort to control Islam in America — from mosques, universities and community centers to our prisons and even within our military. Moderate Muslims who love America and want to be part of our great country are being forced out of those institutions.”

A number of American Muslims have made similar observations:

• The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, who published Voice of Peace, called CAIR the champion of “extremists whose views do not represent Islam.”

• Tashbih Sayyed of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance (CDT) called CAIR “the most accomplished fifth column” in the United States. Jamal Hasan, also of CDT, said that CAIR’s goal is to spread “Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook.”

• According to Kamal Nawash of the Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism, CAIR and similar groups “condemn terrorism on the surface while endorsing an ideology that helps foster extremism,” and adds that “almost all of their members are theocratic Muslims who reject secularism and want to establish Islamic states.”