The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) first began defending MOA in 2014 after the Clarion Project broke a story identifying a MOA enclave in Texas, accompanied with declassified FBI documents identifying MOA as an extremist group and terrorist threat. CAIR distributed a biased article by reporter Andrew Horansky of KHOU11 News in Houston that whitewashed MOA.[1]
In March 2016, Professor Ryan Mauro, creator of the Fuqra Files, appeared on television with a CAIR official, where he showed pictures from the 1992 raid on the Fuqra/MOA terrorist training camp in Colorado and confronted the official about how CAIR-Massachusetts has a prominent MOA member on its board. The CAIR official responded, “there has not been a terrorist group operating in America since 2001 because of the effectiveness of our intelligence and law enforcement.”[2]
In August 2016, CAIR campaigned to stop counter-extremism/counter-terrorism training of California law enforcement personnel by Mauro. CAIR asked the San Diego Police Department to conduct an investigation to find out who attended and to strip away any education credits and paid time off they may have received. A key part of CAIR’s attack was Mauro’s media interviews about Fuqra/MOA.[3]
The U.S. Justice Department designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a CAIR-linked charity that was shut down for financing the Hamas terrorist group. The Justice Department identified CAIR as an “entity” of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, a secret body established by the Brotherhood to advance Hamas’ cause.[4]
In another terrorism trial, that of Sabri Benkhala, federal prosecutors said in a 2008 court filing:
“From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”
The United Arab Emirates, a Muslim country that previously supported CAIR, designated the organization as a terrorist group when it decided to ban the Muslim Brotherhood.[5]
[1] CAIR Defends U.S. Jamaat ul-Fuqra Terror Group. (2014).
[2] CAIR: “No Terror Orgs in U.S.” (2016).
[3] “CAIR Goes After Clarion Project for Training Police on Extremism.” (2016).
[4] Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – Nat’l Headquarters. (2013).
[5] UAE Doubles Down on Designation of CAIR as Terrorists. (2014). See also Is CAIR a Terrorist Group? National Review (2014), http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393614/cair-terror-group-daniel-pipes.
PDF: CAIR-News-Release-Defending-Fuqra
