The Corner

If CAIR’s so Upset…

…maybe it can make a point of not employing and working with people who are later arrested for their links with terrorism. From wikipedia.org:

In December, 2001, Rabih Haddad, a CAIR fundraiser, was charged and deported from the United States because he was the executive director and co-founder of Global Relief Foundation, a terrorist front organization that for financing Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

On December 18, 2002, Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of CAIR-Texas and a co-founder of the Holy Land Foundation, was arrested by the FBI on charges of having ties with front groups that fund Islamic terrorism. In 2005, Elashi and two of his brothers were convicted on 21 counts of federal terrorism charges related to funding Hamas and the illegal export of electronics equipment to U.S. State Department-designated state sponsors of terrorism.

According to the Washington Times, In January 2003, CAIR’s director of community relations and founder of the Islamic Assembly of North America, Bassem Khafagi, was arrested by the FBI on charges of having ties to front groups that fund Islamist terrorism. Khafagi pleaded guilty to charges of visa and bank fraud, and agreed to be deported to Egypt.

The Washington Times however went on to point out that CAIR could not be categorically held responsible for the independent actions of one of its members, and commended it for its condemnation of extremism and terrorism, while at the same time suggesting that “unsettling connections between certain CAIR officials and extremist groups” continued to exist and that CAIR’s defense of high-ranking members convicted of terrorism amounted to a “dishonest campaign to create the sense of a widespread inquisition against Muslims and Arabs in America that simply doesn’t exist.”

In August 2003, CAIR’s former civil-rights coordinator, Randall “Ismail” Royer, along with ten other men known as the “Virginia jihad group” were indicted on 41 counts, including training and participating in jihad activities overseas. The group had connections with Lashkar-e-Taiba and five of them possessed AK-47-style rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Four of the men plead guilty while the other seven were charged with 32 new counts, including conspiring to provide material support to al Qaeda and to the Taliban. He pleaded guilty and is now serving 20 years in federal prison.

There’s contempt. There’s beneath contempt. And then there’s CAIR.

John Podhoretz, a New York Post columnist for 25 years, is the editor of Commentary.
Exit mobile version