CAIR members and former members have been coming forward with accusations of gender bias and sexual harassment.
The purported Islamic advocacy organization so beloved by the media faces credible accusations of widespread workplace misconduct.
T he Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) has spent most of 2022 complaining about “Islamophobia” and clamoring for a government investigation into its critics. Perhaps this was all a diversion to distract attention from CAIR’s own roiling internal problems, which first came to light early last year.
Ever since January 2021, when Hasan Shibly, leader of CAIR’s Florida operations, resigned amid a scandal of spousal-abuse, polygamy, and sexual-harassment allegations, CAIR members and former members have been coming forward with accusations of gender bias and sexual harassment, and the group that bills itself as “a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization” is beginning to look like just another hostile workplace where the men in charge bully and harass the women who work for them with impunity. (CAIR did not respond to repeated requests to comment on these allegations.)
Abetted by its obsequious media enablers, CAIR enjoys an unearned reputation as a civil-rights organization. But even with the assistance of a deferential media to perpetuate its propaganda, CAIR’s façade as an advocacy group beset by anti-Muslim bigots is beginning to crack. What makes it so unusual is that the cracks are coming from within.
In 2008 when FBI agents Lara Burns and Robert Miranda testified at the Holy Land Foundation trial that CAIR is a Hamas front, many anticipated an investigation that would result in criminal charges. Those charges never came. But times have changed, and men were getting away with behavior in 2008 that they wouldn’t get away with today. Wouldn’t it be fitting to see Hamas’s American cousin brought down like all the unwanted touchers who have fallen to the #MeToo movement?
The CAIR brand has endured as a legitimate civil-rights organization in spite of its ties to Hamas, the Islamic Committee for Palestine, the Holy Land Foundation charity, and the Muslim Brotherhood. These connections have been documented for decades, but those who wrote about them have been smeared by CAIR’s allies as bigots (lately “Islamophobes”) or dismissed as amateurs and extremists. And CAIR seemed to be surviving its 2021 sexual-discrimination scandal too, until Leila Fadal of NPR found an angle that couldn’t be dismissed as “Islamophobia” when she wrote about the sex scandal on April 15, 2021.
Fadal’s article makes Shibly look very bad, and he doesn’t help himself much. In interviews with “a half dozen Shibly accusers,” Fadal reports that the accounts “portray Shibly as a man who used his position to seduce women and bully critics with impunity.” The accusations range from the general, as in the charge that “women were given a modest dress code and men were not” and “CAIR leaders would police or comment on how women dress,” to the particular, where individual women, some anonymously and some on the record, tell their stories of Shibly’s behavior.
One woman, a convert named Kyla McRoberts, claims that Shibly approached her on Snapchat and “used his stature as a Muslim leader and her naïveté as a recent convert to Islam to ‘trick’ her into a ‘secret marriage’ behind his legal wife’s back in 2016.” She alleges that Shibly manipulated her into believing he was divorcing his wife and entered into the marriage over the phone, explaining that it was “religiously sanctioned.” Soon Shibly became violent, she alleges, and when she refused to have sex with him, “he told her that, as his wife, she couldn’t say no.”
Fadal spoke to 18 CAIR employees for her exposé, and she notes that many of them “asked NPR not to use their names for fear of legal or professional retaliation.” But not all CAIR accusers have been intimidated into silence.
One of the women profiled in the NPR piece, Jinan Shbat, operates an Instagram account called cairvictimsforum, featuring testimonials from accusers. Another new social-media phenomenon exposing CAIR’s secrets is a group called WeCAIR. Operating at Twitter under the name @WeCAIRMeToo and at the website WeCAIR.net, the group is composed of “former board members, employees, and supporters of CAIR” who are calling for “accountability and justice” from the organization.
On its website, one finds moving testimonials from former members. A sampling:
- “I was 22 years old and he was 42. He groomed me slowly over the phone and told me not to tell anyone.”
- “I submitted a complaint detailing issues of sexual harassment and sexual abuse inside CAIR. They did a sham internal investigation and cleared the men without even speaking to me.”
- “You guys should probably ask why [CAIR leader] uses his religious belief that men can have 4 wives to manipulate women into having affairs with him behind his legal wife’s back . . . [CAIR leader] had an affair behind his legal wife’s back. I have all the evidence. Photos, messages.”
WeCAIR is a serious organization calling for reform, asking reporters to “be unafraid to investigate CAIR as you would any other major organization,” and helping CAIR’s victims air their stories. It is calling for an investigation into CAIR by an impartial body and demanding the release of all former members from their non-disclosure agreements.
Sure, real justice would see CAIR graduating from unindicted co-conspirator to indicted defendant in a federal case charging it as the political front for Hamas in America and shut down, like the Islamic Association for Palestine, which spawned it, and the Holy Land Foundation, which it supported. But another version of justice might see CAIR turned inside-out and then brought down by a Muslim #MeToo movement. Plus, any real investigation into the corporate culture at CAIR may expose many more dirty secrets.
For instance, one former CAIR member, Laila Abdelaziz, accuses Shibly of “taking secret pictures of women while I was on an international trip with him.” NPR is interested in her humiliation, but I’d also like to know what Shibly was doing on this trip to Moscow in 2015.
Kyla McRoberts told NPR that Shibly “stole my self-worth.” She posted on Facebook, poignantly, “Hasan Shibly broke me. I want justice, Where is my voice?” She is not alone.
But Shibly is not the only CAIR big shot accused of sexual misconduct. Executive director Nihad Awad is also under a cloud of suspicion from a former director of CAIR’s Minnesota operations, Lori Saroya, who accuses Awad of subjecting her to “a pattern of unwelcome and highly inappropriate conduct.”
Saroya has been so vocal on social media about Awad’s alleged behavior that CAIR filed a lawsuit against her in May over what it calls the “defamatory postings” in Saroya’s “internet harassment campaign against her former employer.”
In her response to the lawsuit, Saroya alleges not only that CAIR “maintains a culture of discrimination and misogyny” but also that it has “breached its fiduciary duties” by misleading donors “whose contributions it has frequently misused for the purpose of silencing critics.”
She also alleges that CAIR “engages in discrimination, and then seeks to cover it up, or perpetuate it by seeking to silence and retaliate against those who have either been victimized by it or who have raised concerns about it.” Saroya vows that she will not “surrender her right to speak truthfully about CAIR.”
The case is scheduled to go to trial in April 2023. Until then, if Nihad Awad thinks that the man he fired for passing information to the Investigative Project on Terrorism was the only CAIR employee furtively taking notes, recording speeches and conversations, and meeting with journalists, he’s got another thing coming.
CAIR’s leaders should still absolutely worry that other director-level employees are actually “moles” sending information to investigative reporters, but they should probably be even more concerned about the new generation of members that seems ready to push aside the old Islamists who run the organization. What Nihad Awad and his cronies should really fear are the feminist, egalitarian, non-Jew-hating, Muslim women who have become disillusioned with CAIR’s Islamist, misogynistic, supremacist agenda.