The mainstream press regularly refers to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a civil rights group. CAIR holds itself out as America’s foremost Islamic civil rights organization. The Star Tribune recently described CAIR as “a Muslim advocacy group,” whatever that means.
CAIR executive director Nihad Awad celebrated the Hamas 10/7 massacre at the 16th Annual American Muslims for Palestine jamboree in Chicago on November 24. The Middle East Media Research Institute — the invaluable MEMRI — posted the video that caught Awad in the act of being himself, as they used to put it on Candid Camera. If you haven’t seen it before, you can find the video here.
After the video was publicized Awad has more to say to NRO’s Ari Blaff. Blaff reported Awad’s further comments in “CAIR Director Stands by Celebration of October 7 Attack, Claims He Was Praising ‘Everyday Palestinians.’”
None of this should come as a surprise. In Chapter Eight of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, Andrew McCarthy recounted the origins and purposes of CAIR as well as its roots in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network.
In 2014 NRO adapted an excerpt of McCarthy’s chapter on CAIR’s origins and purposes. Here is a key passage:
Though the United States had been a cash cow for Hamas, it was thus a perilous time for the organization when 25 of its members and supporters gathered at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia on October 27, 1993. They were unaware that the FBI was monitoring their deliberations. The confab was a brainstorming exercise: How best to back Hamas and derail Oslo while concealing these activities from the American government?
A little more background to the Philadelphia meeting: For nearly two decades until his extradition in 1997, Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook was the most consequential Muslim Brotherhood operative in the United States. Now living in Egypt, he remains to this day deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau. In the early Nineties, he actually ran the terrorist organization from his home in Virginia.
During his time in the U.S., Marzook formed several organizations to promote the Palestinian jihad against Israel. In 1981, for public-relations purposes, he established the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) in conjunction with two other jihadists: future Hamas chief Khalid al-Mishal and Sami al-Arian (the latter was eventually convicted of conspiring to support Palestinian Islamic Jihad).
In December 1987, the intifada was launched and Hamas was born. Marzook immediately formed the “Palestine Committee” to serve as an umbrella organization, directing the various pro-Hamas initiatives that were developing. He brought under its wing both the IAP (which concentrated on “the political and media fronts”) and a fundraising entity he had established. That entity would eventually be called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) — though it was then known as the “Occupied Land Committee.” The reorganization would better enable the Palestine Committee to comply with the Muslim Brotherhood’s instructions to “increase the financial and the moral support for Hamas,” to “fight surrendering solutions” (like Oslo), and to publicize “the savagery of the Jews.”
It was under the auspices of the Palestine Committee that the 1993 Philadelphia meeting was convened. It was clear even then that Marzook’s Hamas network was anticipating the birth of yet another organization. The Palestine Committee’s amended by-laws declared that an as-yet-unnamed entity was already in the larval stage, “operat[ing] through” the IAP, and soon to “become an official organization for political work, and its headquarters will be in Washington, insha Allah.”
In the United States, the “political work” was crucial. The overarching mission, of course, was quite clear. As the IAP had explained in a December 1988 edition of its Arabic magazine, Ila Filastin, “The call for jihad in the name of Allah is the only path for liberation of Palestine and all the Muslim lands. We promise Allah, continuing the jihad way and the martyrdom’s way.” But while blatant summonses to jihad might stir the faithful in Islamic countries openly hostile to Jews, they were not going to fly in America — and even less so in an America whose financial heart had just been shaken by the jihadist bombing of the World Trade Center. The Brotherhood’s approach in the U.S. would have to be more subtle.
That was where the new organization would come in, as those gathered in Philadelphia — including Marzook’s brother-in-law and HLF co-founder Ghassan Elashi — explained. Although the Brotherhood had ideological depth and impressive fundraising mechanisms, Marzook had long been concerned that his network lacked the media and political savvy needed to advance an agenda in modern America. Now more than ever, they needed what HLF’s Shukri Abu Baker called “a media twinkle.”
CAIR is born:
In 1994, less than a year after the Philadelphia Hamas meeting, the Islamists unleashed their new organization: the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Just as the Palestine Committee by-laws had foretold, CAIR sprang from the womb of IAP and set up its headquarters in the nation’s capital.
Actually, CAIR was already in existence and firmly in the Brotherhood fold even before its incorporation was announced. We know that because, in preparing for a meeting held on July 30, 1994, the Palestine Committee prepared a written agenda that was later seized by the FBI. It stated that a top discussion topic would be “suggestions to develop work” for several named “organizations.” Included among these was “CAIR,” in addition to the IAP and HLF, among others. The agenda elucidated that “complete coordination” was sought among the various groups. Critically, it stressed that the effort was under Brotherhood direction: “This is not a separate movement from the mother Group.”
NRO published the adapted excerpt in 2014 as “The roots of CAIR’s intimidation campaign.” Everyone should know this story.
NOTE: NRO published my own 2007 column “Coming clean about CAIR” in connection with CAIR’s identification as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation.
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