The Washington Times has posted a preview of Audrey Hudson's story on CAIR tomorrow:

Membership in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has declined more than 90 percent since the 2001 terrorist attacks, Audrey Hudson will report in Tuesday's editions of The Washington Times.

According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.

With its characteristic straightforwardness, CAIR responded to the Times's inquiry on its membership decline as follows:

Asked about the decline, Parvez Ahmed, CAIR board chairman, pointed to the number of individual donors to the organization.

"We are proud that our grass-roots support in the American Muslim community has allowed CAIR to grow from having eight chapters and offices in 2001 to having 33 today," Mr. Ahmed said.

One can only speculate that CAIR subsists on private contributions from non-members or that its most significant support is at an undisclosed location or two somewhere outside the United States.

JOHN adds: One wonders--at what point does CAIR have few enough members that it will no longer be viewed by every news outlet in the United States as the most authentic representative of American Muslims? Or does CAIR need to have any members at all for that purpose?

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