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By Robert Spencer, Frontpage Magazine
The media isn’t going to tell you this. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization.”
In that guise, and as it has championed numerous far-left causes, it has become a respected member of the leftist establishment, with numerous ignorant and self-serving politicians lavishing praise on this unsavory gang in hopes of gaining Muslim votes.
Among them has been, not surprisingly, Kamala Harris.
This has been known for years, but no one has cared. Back in Oct. 2020, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “as California’s attorney general and then as U.S. senator, Harris forged a relationship with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the nation’s top anti-Israel groups and advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state.”
After the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, this matters more than ever.
CAIR, the Free Beacon added, “advised Harris on community issues during her time in California politics, and she later offered the group her ‘gratitude and admiration’ in a 2018 personal letter to the group.”
Specifically, “Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, praised Harris in 2015 for including the group in an interfaith meeting with law enforcement officials.
Harris, he said, ‘exemplified leadership’ by vowing to tackle Islamophobia at a time when the state’s Jewish institutions were facing threats.”
That was bad enough, since “Islamophobia” is a propaganda weapon designed to intimidate people that it is wrong — somehow “bigoted” — to oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women.
Even worse, long before he praised Kamala Harris, Hussam Ayloush has repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups.
In 2017, with Donald Trump in the White House, Ayloush called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Yet the following year, Harris wrote to CAIR: “Please accept my gratitude and admiration for your tireless work to promote peace, justice, and mutual understanding.”
Even that was not all. “As California’s top cop,” the Free Beacon noted, “Harris partnered with local CAIR officials and relied on them to advise her about community matters. In 2015, for instance, Harris hosted CAIR for an interfaith community event following a deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In 2016, as Harris ran for the Senate, CAIR’s political action committee donated $1,750 to boost her campaign.”
That may not be much in the larger scheme of things, but imagine the outcry if Donald Trump had taken a small fraction of that amount from a group linked to the Ku Klux Klan.
Harris’ ties to CAIR take on a new urgency now that she is a presidential candidate, and now that this self-proclaimed “civil rights organization” is more forthright than it used to be about where it really stands:
CAIR’s cofounder and longtime executive director Nihad Awad infamously said that he was “happy” about Hamas’ Oct. 7 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis.
In April 2024, Awad eulogized a Muslim Brotherhood cleric, Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, who had ties to al-Qaeda as well as Hamas:
“The Islamic nation has lost one of its biggest emblems and men with the passing of Sheikh Alam and worker Abdul Majeed Al-Zindani after he dedicated his life to the service of the Quran and the manifestation of its miracles that never cease. He remained tall and firm in the face of challenges, tribulations, pressure, and rankings until he met the Almighty Allah. Our condolences to his family, Yemen, and our nation. We ask Allah, the Merciful, the Merciful and the Forgiving, to have mercy on him, forgive him and reward him with the best of rewards.”
Al-Zindani was on the UN Security Council’s list of specially designated terrorists.
If Trump had similar ties to any of the groups that the leftist establishment claims are made up of “right-wing extremists,” including a group that opposes CAIR and jihad terror and got added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” list for doing so, the media outcry would be shrill and intense.
Trump would be hounded everywhere until he disavowed the group and returned its donation.
No one, however, is asking Harris about CAIR. That’s because Harris, CAIR, and the media are all part of the same leftist establishment.
Surely you don’t expect them to police themselves, do you?
Politicians can associate freely with groups that are on the left’s approved list, and be secure in the knowledge that there will be no accountability.
Responsibility to the American people? Come on, man! This ain’t 1776 anymore!
