Best Buy: TV’s, computers and Hamas

Marc Fink reports at the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch that Best Buy contributed as a Platinum sponsor to the annual banquet of CAIR’s Minnesota chapter this past February. Best Buy maintains its corporate headquarters in suburban Minneapolis, so this story hits close to home. The company is dealing with a few other public relations issues deriving from the its executive leadership and business struggles, so this story has flown under the radar.

The featured speaker at CAIR Minnesota’s annual banquet, incidentally, was Feisal Abdul Rauf, best known as the guy who was leading the efforts to build the 13-story Islamic community center Park51 (the Ground Zero Mosque) two blocks from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.

What’s wrong with funneling money to an organization that holds itself out as a “civil rights group”? Isn’t it a worthy object of corporate philanthropy? Well, no.

Readers will recall that the United States named CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land Foundation, a fundraiser for Hamas that the government shut down in the aftermath of 9/11. I wrote about CAIR’s identification as an unindicted co-conpirator of the HLF in “Coming clean about CAIR.”

CAIR’s roots lie in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas affiliate. See, e.g., chapter 8 of Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad and Daniel Pipes’s online bibliography “Getting to know the Council on American-Islamic Relations.” At the Holy Land Foundation trial the government introduced testimony regarding CAIR’s establishment as a front group to mislead the likes of Best Buy, though you have to be clueless to be falling for the act at this point.

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