CAIR for dummies

Is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) a civil rights group, as it purports to be? Or is it a terrorist front group? The government treats it as a bit of both. On the one hand, it occasionally collaborates with CAIR on sensitivity training for government agencies such as the FBI and the TSA. On the other hand, the government named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation in the prosecution of HLF as a Hamas front group. So which is it?
Now comes The Investigative Project on Terrorism with “CAIR exposed,” a ten-part series whose first installment appeared yesterday. Part 1 of the series begins with CAIR’s origins in the Hamas front known as the Islamic Association of Palestine and the attendance of two key leaders (Omar Ahmad and Niahd Awad) at the 1993 meeting in Philadelphia that had been called by Hamas members and supporters to devise a strategy for torpedoing the Oslo Accords.
Nihad Awad is the executive director of CAIR and a player in Washington. He is, for example, a long-time friend and important supporter of Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison. Awad attended the 1993 Philadelphia meeting. The meeting had been surreptitiously taped by the FBI but the IPT report notes that Awad’s attendance at the meeting had never been confirmed before the testimony of FBI agent Lara Burns at the trial of the HLF last year. Awad had previously testified that he could not recall having attended the meeting. Candor is not one of his strong points.
The IPT series will be a key document summarizing the public record on CAIR and establishing its status as something substantially other than what it purports to be.
Via Counterterrorism Blog and Michelle Malkin.
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