The White House rushed to distance itself from CAIR after Awad’s 10/7 comments, but the remarks are totally in keeping with the group’s history.
As Hamas terrorists spilled across the southern border of Israel, raping women, massacring concertgoers, beheading farmhands, and burning children alive, the leader of the most influential American Muslim lobbying group in the country attacked the Jewish state.
“All Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, October 8th, and every day, in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime,” Nihad Awad, the executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), wrote on October 7 — before Israel had even responded to the atrocities. The community leader even went so far as to apply Martin Luther King Jr.’s description of a riot as the “language of the unheard” to the events of 10/7.
Throughout the succeeding weeks, Awad questioned the accounts of Israelis who witnessed the massacre and rape of their fellow partiers at the Nova Music Festival, arguing that “Biden and Netanyahu proved to have lied several times” about the atrocities, which had at that point been confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses and, in some cases, recorded on video. Less than a week later, Awad hailed the 10/7 attacks: “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
“And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves. And, yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense,” he continued to rapturous applause at the American Muslims for Palestine’s annual gathering. He never mentioned Hamas by name and later said he was celebrating the “everyday Palestinians” who invaded Israel, not the terror group.
Awad’s comments struck many as shocking and even led the White House to quietly remove CAIR from its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.”
But for a small circle of terror-finance experts and federal investigators, it came as no surprise that Awad would whitewash terrorism.
“All of a sudden there’s an uproar and then the White House scrubs them from the antisemitism strategy. I was reading a story just this afternoon that a bunch of Democratic congressmen are distancing themselves from CAIR,” Lorenzo Vidino, a Muslim Brotherhood expert at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told National Review. “You know, it’s great, but the information about CAIR being part of this milieu has been there for a long time.”
In 2022, Awad eulogized Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Muslim Brotherhood preacher with a reputation for praising suicide bombers as “heroes” and calling for the slaughter of Jews.
Awad remembered the extremist fondly: “May Allah have mercy on you, forgive you, and reward you.”
But his support for extremism goes back much further.
Awad’s first public comments in support of Hamas came in 1994, just months after President Bill Clinton coaxed Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat to begrudgingly shake hands on the White House lawn. The Clinton administration believed the PLO could be dealt with and sought to empower Arafat while sidelining its upstart Islamist rival. Nevertheless, with the prospect of peace in the air, Awad told a group of students at Barry University months after the accord’s launch, “I am in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO.”
It would take more than a decade, as the pile of twisted steel and bodies from the Second Intifada grew, for Awad to tepidly walk back his support for the terror group. CAIR, for its part, argues that it’s an “urban legend” that Awad ever supported Hamas and points out that he condemns “radicals” later on in his talk. The group also falsely claims his comments at Barry came before Hamas had carried out its first suicide bombing. In fact, the first Hamas suicide bombing took place in April 1993, months before Awad’s appearance at Barry, not in October 1994, as CAIR claims.
Yet despite that record, and thanks to a carefully orchestrated media strategy, Awad and his organization have come to be seen as legitimate representatives of Islam by elites within academia, the media, and civil society.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, American administrations lined up to court the CAIR leader in a desperate bid to build bridges with the Muslim community. Awad was among a handful of leaders who met with President George W. Bush shortly after the Twin Towers fell. Months later, several of Awad’s close associates working in the largest Muslim American charity, the Holy Land Foundation, would be implicated in a scheme to funnel money back to Hamas.
CAIR was not indicted in the Holy Land Foundation trial and was instead listed as an unindicted co-conspirator. In a section of its website dedicated to “dispelling rumors,” CAIR points out that the judge in the Holy Land trial said from the bench “this case is not about CAIR.”
“Islamophobic groups attempt to exploit the public’s unfamiliarity with the trial to use the unindicted co-conspirator listing to smear CAIR’s reputation,” the website reads.
Despite his proximity to convicted terror financiers, Awad thrived professionally throughout the coming years, building CAIR into a nationally recognized lobbying group.
But for those paying attention, Awad has been perfectly clear for at least three decades about his feelings toward Hamas, Israel’s right to exist, and the prospect of Jews and Palestinians living peacefully side-by-side.
Philadelphia Meeting
In September 1993, hope was in the air. Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed, at the coaxing of President Clinton, to begin a negotiated process to reach a final peace deal. Unbeknownst to most Americans cheering on the prospect of peace, there was then gathering a small group of Islamists committed to ensuring that future never materialized.
It was still warm and balmy in Philadelphia by October, when Palestine Committee members piled into a local Marriott to discuss how to unravel any chance for a genuine two-state solution in the Middle East.
The aspirations of millions were a nightmare to the committee members, a network established in America in the early ’80s to fundraise for and defend Hamas. The dream of a lasting peace – rooted in the Jewish State’s right to exist and an end to terrorism – was abhorrent to the committee. They gathered for two days, secretly plotting how to pull down the Oslo Accords like a Jenga tower to ensure they — and not the PLO — would rule over the Palestinians and continue the bloody struggle against the Jews.
Awad was a member of the committee by virtue of his role as director of public relations for the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which was created in 1981 at the behest of Khaled Meshal, the future politburo chairman of Hamas. The Association’s goal was to serve as the “public voice of Hamas” in America, Matthew Levitt, a terror- finance expert and former Treasury Department investigator, wrote in his book about the militant group.
They spoke breezily about their support for terrorism, strategies to derail Oslo, and how best to get charitable donations into the hands of Hamas. Still, the committee leaders implored participants to avoid speaking of the terror group openly. “Please don’t mention the name Samah in an explicit manner,” Shukri Abu Baker, the founder of Holy Land said, referring to Hamas spelled backward. “We agree on saying it as ‘sister Samah.’”
Unbeknownst to the committee members, American authorities were keeping close tabs on their activities: FBI agents secretly wiretapped the infamous “Philadelphia Meeting.”
In February, terrorists seeking to punish America for supporting Israel tried to bomb the World Trade Center. The demolition mostly failed, but the incident revealed glaring loopholes within American counter-terrorism laws that took three years, and congressional approval, to reform. New “material-support” laws were passed allowing the U.S. to sanction individuals and entities found to be providing resources to terrorist groups. In the meantime, President Clinton signed an executive order in January 1995 censuring individuals “who threatened to disrupt the Middle East peace process.”
Hamas’ top official in America, Mousa Abu Marzook, was among the first people placed on the new terror watch list and the Palestinian terror group was one of the earliest designated a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) in October 1997.
The FBI’s focus on the Philadelphia meeting proved prescient.
Jihad was a central topic throughout the two-day conference, according to transcripts of the FBI recordings produced by the government at the Holy Land trial. “I’m working on Jihad, support the Jihad, support the Jihad, support the resistance to the occupation,” one attendee says unflinchingly during the conference. The objective of such militarism, an American fundraiser for Hamas explains, is clear. “We make this presentation to the people [the Palestinians] in order to derail the [Oslo] agreement,” Abdel Halim Al Ashqar says, “in order to cause the alternatives in front of them to fail and in order to make people aware of the facts.”
Committee members shared a commitment to armed struggle against Israel. “The most important thing we can provide in this stage is to support Jihad in Palestine. I believe it is the only way if we want to bring the goal of the [Oslo] accord to fail,” another participant argues. “Those people [that] have a direct relationship with Jihad,” the man elaborates, “must get more money.”
“In our letters we sent to people, we ought to place emphasis on the families of the martyrs, the prisoners, the orphans, and the families of the wounded.”
According to the FBI transcript, Awad was generally more tight-lipped during the meeting, letting senior committee officials set the pace — but he offered no objections to their extreme rhetoric. Years later, Awad insisted repeatedly during a deposition that he couldn’t “remember” whether he was invited to or attended the Philadelphia meeting.
Neither Awad nor CAIR responded to a request for comment.
A significant part of the gathering was also dedicated to building out a sophisticated media operation through which the group’s message could be softened and made more palatable to an American audience.
Omar Ahmed, IAP’s president (and later, Awad’s fellow CAIR cofounder), underscored the importance of “broadcasting the Islamic point of view in U.S. media,” specifically citing the former’s recent work. “We can’t, as an American organization, say we represent Samah,” Ahmed clarified using the agreed-upon Hamas codeword.
“When Nihad appeared on CNN and talked in the way he spoke, this greatly reduces the severity of allegations of radicalism,” Ahmed added. Awad had previously spoken on CNN’s Crossfire, where “he advanced Hamas’s point of view with words that were palatable to the American public,” Vidino, the George Washington University professor, wrote in a recent brief about the committee.
Awad piggybacks off Ahmed’s point by advocating “training and qualifying individuals in the branches and the communities on media activism through holding special courses.” Another goal Awad stresses is the placement of op-eds in American papers, a strategy that eventually paid dividends in the coming years as Hamas leaders garnered bylines in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.
The media strategy, though, involved walking a tightrope between catering to Muslim American sensibilities and the general public. “If you want to [speak to] the Americans, you lose the Muslims,” Ahmed says at one point. “If you address the Muslims, it means that you cannot reveal your address to the Americans,” the future CAIR boss continues.
“If someone asked you if you want to destroy Israel, what are you going to say on TV? If you give an inconclusive response, which is like you didn’t answer the question, someone will come to you and tell you that you have forsaken your principles.”
The messaging campaign has made considerable inroads with young left-leaning Americans. In November, a YouGov poll found Americans under 30 were about evenly split on the question of who is to blame for the “current hostilities” between Israel and a terror group whose mission is to destroy the Jewish state. The same findings were echoed in a Pew survey around the same time.
Those aren’t just a few errant studies.
Support for Hamas among Americans under 30 consistently hovers in the teens, multiple times higher than the general population. A Harvard survey drilled down even deeper among Americans in their twenties and found that 60 percent agreed that “Hamas and Israel both have fairly equal just causes.” A nearly identical number (58 percent) supported the statement, “the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians,” and nearly half (45 percent) sided more with the Palestinian terror group than with Israel.
CAIR Emerges
The brainstorming session of Hamas supporters in America ended with a desire to open a new group in the nation’s capital, one untainted by religious imagery and capable of establishing a mainstream foothold.
“In my opinion,” one unidentified attendee suggests, “we must form a new organization for activism which will be neutral because we are placed in a corner. It is known who we are, we are marked and I believe that there should be a new neutral organization which works on both sides.”
The point is picked up by Baker: “Let’s not hoist a large Islamic flag, and let’s not be barbaric-talking. We will remain a front so that if the thing [America designating Hamas a terror group] happens, we will benefit from the new happenings instead of having all of our organizations classified and exposed.”
Baker insists that any new group should avoid using explicitly religious imagery or symbolism. “Why Al Aqsa Educational?” he asks rhetorically, retelling a conversation he had with another Committee member.
“When you go to Oxford, they will ask you: ‘Sir, what is Aqsa?’ Make it the ‘Palestinian General Education Academy.’ Make yourself a big name like that and give it a media twinkle, and there is no need for Al Aqsa, Al Quds, Al Sakhra, and all that stuff.”
There wasn’t anything particularly new about the Committee’s desire to create a modern advocacy organization. Two years earlier, the group committed to paper its goal of creating “an official organization for political work and its headquarters will be in Washington, God’s willing.”
The plans came to fruition in 1994 when CAIR opened its doors in the nation’s capital with Awad and Ahmed at its helm. Years later, as federal investigators were picking through the Holy Land case and came across the damning statements, prosecutors asked an FBI agent on the case whether any recently founded group fulfilled the Palestine Committee’s aspirations for a respectable Washington-based advocacy group.
“CAIR,” special agent Lara Burns responded.