In "Take care when CAIR is quoted as a 'reliable' source" in JWeekly.com, February 4, Eric Rozenman of CAMERA offers the common sense on this unsavory and charmless group of thugs (Hi, Honest Ibe! Good morning, Brave Ahmed!) that we have noted many times at Jihad Watch, and that still eludes (on purpose) the great investigators in the mainstream media:
After the Fort Hood shooting massacre in November, allegedly carried out by Maj. Nidal Hasan, USA Today used a quote from Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations -- but identified CAIR only as "a Muslim advocacy group."When five American Muslims from the Alexandria, Va., area were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of intent to wage jihad, the Washington Post in December reported without context that "two major groups -- the Muslim Public Affairs Council and CAIR -- said this week that they would launch counter-radicalization programs aimed at young people."
News media often treat CAIR uncritically as a civil rights organization.
But CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terrorism funding case. And at least five people associated with CAIR, including some who were staff members at the time of their charges, have been jailed or deported on terrorism-related charges.
In December, NPR introduced a segment with Hooper about the Americans arrested in Pakistan by alluding to something more: " ... It's important to note that there's been a contentious relationship between CAIR and the FBI in recent years."
But details such as the following were absent:
• In 2009, Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker, founding members of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, once America's largest Muslim charity, were each sentenced to 65 years in prison in a federal case charging HLF with funneling more than $12 million to Hamas.
Hamas is responsible for the murders of hundreds of Israelis. Elashi also was a founder of CAIR's Texas chapter and had been convicted in a 2004 Hamas-related case.
• Mousa Abu Marzook, a one-time CAIR official, was designated by the U.S. government in 1995 as a "terrorist and Hamas leader." He now helps direct Hamas from Syria.
• Randall Royer, CAIR's former civil rights coordinator, began serving a 20-year federal sentence in 2004 for, among other things, helping al Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan and recruiting for Lashkar e-Taiba, the jihadi network blamed for the 2008 Mumbai massacres.
• Bassem Khafagi, CAIR's former community relations director, was arrested for involvement with the Islamic Assembly of North America. IANA was suspected of aiding sheiks opposed to the Saudi Arabian government and linked to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Khafagi pleaded guilty to visa and bank fraud charges and was deported.
• Rabih Haddad, once a CAIR fundraiser, was arrested on terrorism-related charges. In 2002, the U.S. Treasury designated the Global Relief Foundation, which Haddad had co-founded, as a terrorist-financing organization. He was deported.
• In 2009, members of the Somali immigrant community in Minneapolis protested at a CAIR ice cream social, alleging that the group had discouraged local Somalis from cooperating with the FBI. The bureau was investigating the disappearance of at least 20 young Somali American men, who reportedly traveled to Somalia to wage jihad against the U.N.-supported transitional government....
CAIR deceitful? No! How can this be?
Maybe the main office of CAIR could be relocated to Gitmo?
I had thought when the FBI dropped these creeps that would be the end of CAIR's omnipresence as a "Muslim civil rights group". Silly me. I think a lot of lazy journalists have CAIR on speed dial, as their automatic go-to guys for any "Muslim issue", and they're not about to stop now.
Now, certainly, the use of CAIR is hardly the only example of lazy journalism—often the same talking heads are trotted out whenever their "area of expertise" comes up, no matter how ignorant they may have proven in the past.
But the stakes are a lot higher with Jihad terrorism than they are with many other matters-and CAIR is not merely pompous and ignorant, like so many of these "experts"—but are actively obfuscating and lying, and actually aiding our enemies—when they are not our enemies themselves.
And it's not just the media. It's local law enforcement, and child protective services in the case of Rifqa Bary, and many other clueless entities charged with our protection. Ultimately, it's not just lazy, it's suicidal.
Remember when becoming a journalist was a calling? It used to mean something, when one was a journalist. Often it meant risking one's life to speak of the unspeakable, to expose corruption (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein leap to mind), covering war from the vantage point of the people involved, and all that trite and unnecessary stuff.
It meant having a such a passion for the truth, such a knack for digging up facts, and such a willingness to protect one's sources that a journalist would go to jail, if necessary.
As gravenimage observes, it's so much easier to simply call someone who will tell the press what to write. Once upon a time, laziness meant using the wire services as sources, even though one had to dig just a bit, for information.
cair SUCKS.
Get out of our country islamic Barbarians.
"charmless group of thugs (Hi, Honest Ibe! Good morning, Brave Ahmed!)"
Oh, so exactly! Losers. Total and complete Losers.
CAIR is a National-Security threat. Cair aims to further the cause of islam in America. Cair is a foreign army on our soil which wages a mostly stealthy campaign to ensure islam becomes deeply entrenched in our land. What their activities show do not have to do anything with freely practicing “religion”.
Activities which are criminal in nature such as the material support of military operations outside or inside our country are not under the religious realm. Openly brainwashing angry and disgruntled incarcerated felons with cherry picked propaganda instilling great hate towards the people and country they live in is nothing short of treason and pure subterfuge. Their Koran is more racsist and supremasist that even Hitlers Mein Kampf. Cair IS the enemy.
When will CAIR be exposed for the Saudi mouth piece that they really are?
People can start by not reading the Columbus Dispatch.