The FBI has finally stopped working, at least for the moment, with the unindicted co-conspirators of CAIR, and so the Detroit News throws them this helpful puff piece.
“FBI limits work with Muslim civil rights group amid dispute: Some vow to stop cooperating with agency amid dispute,” by Gregg Krupa for The Detroit News, April 27 (thanks to all who sent this in):
The FBI has suspended much of its work with the nation’s largest civil rights organization for Muslims after cooperating for years on the training of agents and outreach to Muslims.
A host of Muslim and Arab organizations have threatened to stop cooperating with the FBI until the dispute over the Council on American Islamic Relations is resolved.
The issue, which is playing out amid large Muslim and Arab populations in Metro Detroit and nationally, is eroding relations between Muslims and law enforcement, Muslim leaders say. FBI officials also express concern about the impact on those relationships, which both consider integral to protecting national security and civil rights.
“The FBI has had to limit its formal contact with CAIR field offices until certain issues are addressed by CAIR’s national headquarters,” said Assistant FBI Director John Miller, concerning action that was taken, but not announced, last autumn. “CAIR’s leadership is aware of this. Beyond that, we have no further comment.”
Officials of CAIR, which has 35 field offices in 19 states, say they have not been informed of the concerns. But at a trial in Dallas last year of a major Muslim charity, the prosecution presented evidence that two CAIR officials participated in a 1993 meeting about how to represent Hamas in the United States.
Establishing CAIR may have resulted from that effort, an FBI agent suggested in her testimony. And CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, a designation it has contested in court.
While FBI officials would not say publicly why it has ended most cooperation with CAIR, privately they say the FBI would be hard-pressed to explain why it would continue to engage as a partner an organization with two leaders who attended such a meeting.
CAIR officials deny the organization is a front for Hamas, or that it was organized as a result of the conversation the FBI recorded in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, President Bill Clinton did not designate Hamas as a terrorist organization until 1995.
“Our work has been overwhelmingly based upon issues directly affecting Muslims, from giving diversity trainings, empowering Muslims through civic engagement trainings and in taking discrimination cases,” said Dawud Walid, the executive director of CAIR-Michigan. “Probably not even 1 percent of CAIR’s work in the past 15 years has been related to the grievances of Palestinians. This does not reflect the work of an alleged front group for people in the Gaza Strip.” […]
Unless, of course, it is working for a larger agenda. After all, the Charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, says that the Movement’s “extent in place is anywhere that there are Muslims who embrace Islam as their way of life everywhere in the globe. This being so, it extends to the depth of the earth and reaches out to the heaven.”
Meanwhile, the FBI said it will continue to review civil rights complaints filed by CAIR.
Even the trumped-up ones?