“CAIR is Hamas,” pithily recognized the former FBI agent and United States Marine Corps officer John Guandolo in 2013 about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which originated as an American Hamas front group. His book, Raising a Jihadi Generation: Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in America, remains highly relevant almost a decade later as Muslim Brotherhood (MB)-derived groups such as CAIR face increased scrutiny.
The January 15 hostage-taking of a rabbi and three Jewish congregants at a Colleyville, Texas, synagogue by the British-Pakistani Muslim Malik Faisal Akram brought the faux civil rights group CAIR unwelcome attention. During this one-day crisis that ended with all hostages escaping, this terrorist killed by police had demanded the release of the Pakistani woman Aafia Siddiqui, held in a federal prison medical center in nearby Fort Worth. A federal court in 2010 had sentenced her to 86 years imprisonment for her 2008 shooting at American military personnel and an FBI agent in Afghanistan after her capture with terrorist planning documents.
While Siddiqui became a cause célèbre for jihadists such as Akram worldwide, CAIR in a similar vein had become a key proponent in the American “Free Aafia” campaign. Unsurprisingly, CAIR has increasingly exposed the antisemitic sympathies it shares with Siddiqui, who at her trial called for DNA testing to reveal whether any of her jurors were Jewish. CAIR’s Texas chapter (CAIR-TX) sponsored a September 18, 2021, rally outside Siddiqui’s Fort Worth prison where one speaker denounced “Zionist judges” for her plight. Additionally, a November 10, 2021, CAIR-TX webinar featured the notorious Muslim antisemite Linda Sarsour, who blathered fables about Siddiqui being a “political prisoner.”
As outraged Jewish critics such as the American-Israeli political commentator Caroline Glick noted, CAIR’s Siddiqui boosterism fit wider antisemitic patterns. Numerous commentators blasted Zahra Billoo, leader of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter, for her November 27, 2021, comments at a conference of the equally antisemitic American Muslims for Palestine. There she had castigated Muslim relations with “polite Zionists” in synagogues and other basic Jewish communities such as university Hillel groups, words that could only endanger Jews.
CAIR’s expressed hostility to Israel and America recalls Guandolo’s 2013 warning that “America faces an insurgency inside our homeland” from such MB-aligned groups. Beginning with the Muslim Students Association’s (MSA) 1963 founding, the “Muslim Brotherhood has been in America for over 50 years,” he worried. The MSA in turn spawned numerous other organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT).
CAIR’s success in establishing itself as a reputable organization that enjoys fawning media attention reminded of Guandolo’s discussion of how such MB allies pursued influence operations to further subversive objectives. Thus “when the Muslim Brotherhood came to America, it came with a plan,” namely “Civilization Jihad,” he wrote. Accordingly, MB members “insinuated themselves into our society, grew their numbers, strength and support, and began to work towards their objective of overthrowing the United States.”
Guandolo’s tracing of the MB’s organizational tree in America exposed a worrying network of ideological influences. “Using conservative estimates, and just using a handful of known Muslim Brotherhood entities, we see the MB has over 2,000 organizations,” he wrote, a “massive infrastructure for this hostile movement.” Indeed, given groups such as ISNA, the “most prominent Islamic organizations in America ARE a part of the Movement.”
CAIR’s strong ties with numerous Democratic Party politicians testified to MB influence upon policymaking circles. The “Muslim Brotherhood has operatives in our federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, our military, but, most importantly, advising our senior leadership in our national security apparatus,” Guandolo wrote. This demonstrates that MB organizations “seek to convince U.S. leaders to use them as the ‘go to’ guys for all questions about Islam and counterterrorism strategies.”
According to revealed MB documents, this therefore “is Civilization Jihad by OUR hands,” Guandolo noted. MB organizations “seek to get our leadership—political, religious, media, university/college presidents and boards, and law enforcement/intelligence/military professionals to do their bidding for them.” Precisely this occurred when federal agencies in 2011 purged their training materials on jihadist threats at the behest of groups such as CAIR and ISNA.
Guandolo concluded that when such an Islamic brainwashing
happens, the training policies, and decision-making all favors the Muslim Brotherhood. It also numbs organizations to the danger the MB poses, puts forth an understanding of Islamic Law that has no basis in fact, and seeks to dampen all law enforcement responses to real threats.
Yet CAIR’s own involvement with jihadist terrorism belies the smooth-talking appearance of CAIR’s “jihadis in suits.” Guandolo noted CAIR’s unindicted coconspirator status in the 2008 federal conviction of the Holy Land Foundation for terrorism financing. Then the largest “Islamic charity in the United States,” it “sent more than $12 million overseas to fund Hamas.”
The federal government has also convicted several CAIR employees on terrorism charges. Correspondingly, Guandolo stressed “that Muslim Brotherhood organizations will advocate non-violence as a course of action today, but they will use violence when they are ready and required to do so.” In actuality, the “Muslim Brotherhood in America prepares the ground for, supports, and facilitates jihadi operations.”
Concealing Islam’s traditional harder aspects such as jihad warfare within a softer, soothing exterior image of Islam as peaceful reflects, in fact, Islam’s historic doctrinal development. “This is aligned with the Koranic concept of Abrogation or Progressive Revelation which is how Muhammad brought the first generation of Muslims to Islam—progressively in stages,” Guandolo wrote. Therefore, the “Muslim Brotherhood lies to non-Muslims to get them to convert to Islam” and will “speak softly and not become argumentative.” “Some MB leaders are trained intelligence officers” and “are professionally trained to manipulate others,” he added.
Almost a decade ago Guandolo outlined the insidious influence of MB allies such as CAIR upon America’s private and public leadership, a corrosive environment that continues unabated. Yet his book also indicated how an awakened American citizenry can retake lost commanding heights in society, as CAIR’s recent embarrassments indicate. A forthcoming article will examine this aspect of counterjihad.
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says
CAIR has someone with the job title National Communications Director. His name is Ibrahim Hooper, and ihooper@cair.com is his email address. For a national communications director, he is remarkable uncommunicative. He never answered the multiple emails I sent him about how to join CAIR, and I am still waiting for a reply to the handwritten letter I mailed him some weeks ago.
Wanna participate in a little experiment? Write him an email and see if he will give you any reply at all. Maybe I got no reply because I did not say “please” enough; your inquiry might be more obsequiously worded. Ask him any innocuous question. A few suggestions…
When you read the Quran for the first time, did you run across any passages where you thought, “Hey, I don’t agree with that!”?
How many members does CAIR have?
May a kafir, even a Zionist, join CAIR?
What’s your favorite aya?
notnolib says
His name is Doug. Perhaps he didn’t respond because he didn’t know the message was for him. Sometimes that condom cap he wears is a little tight, and affects his ability respond. Also, keep in mind that muslims have one shared brain, and it probably wasn’t Doug’s turn to have it
Walter Sieruk says
A message, very much, need to be sent to those stealth jihad- minded Muslims who are living in the USA who attempt to have Sharia law enacted in this country s those insidious stealth jihadists that CAIR uses They all need to be reminded that the United States had something that is far better than Sharia law. It’s the US Constitution. This is America, not Iran.
As the former US President, Theodore Roosevelt, had well-spoken when he declared in a speech “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is only room here for only hundred percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
Walter Sieruk says
CAIR employs what is known as the Stealth jihad otherwise called the Muslim method of Islamic Gradualism. In contrast to the way of the violent jihad or also called the militant jihad.
This non-violent form of the jihad for Islam is a very sly, insidious, subtle and deceptive way of working for the advancement of Islam.
This Muslim scheme for achieving the goal of the Islamic agenda is as, many times, as subtly effective as it is demonically clever.
Furthermore, this Islamic gradualism, in some ways, is very similar to the instruction printed in the book entitled THE ART OF WAR by Sun Tzu. Which reads “At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to opposes you”
Walter Sieruk says
Some of the jihad-minded Muslims , as those of CAIR use the strategy that is the Islamic doctrine of Taqiyya in the stealth jihad for Islam for the advancement Islam with its Sharia in American.
They use Taqiyya is the Islamic dogma that deception is a good ploy as long as it’s done for the advancement of Islam. Therefore, about those who engage in deception the Bible informs its readers that “Enemies disguised themselves with their lips. Proverbs 26:24.
Further in the same chapter of Proverbs [v.26] teaches Their malice may be concealed by deception.” [N.I.V.] In conclusion. let’s not be beguiled to the sly and insidious Muslim methods of Taqiyya.
Walter Sieruk says
Those scheming stealth jihadist /Muslims, CAIR supported or not, who attempt to have Sharia law set up in America engage in the doctrines of the Islamic doctrine of Taqiyya which is very insidious. Taqiyya is the jihad dogma that deception is a good thing to do as long as it’s done for the advancement of Islam in the United States with its Sharia law.
Nevertheless, the God of the Bible “condemns those who devise wicked schemes…” Proverbs 12:11. [N.I.V.]
Likewise, Proverbs 12:20 teaches “Deceit is in the hearts of those who plot evil.”