The jihad-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations today endorsed President Barack Obama’s heated criticism of Donald Trump’s ambitious anti-jihad reform, which includes a temporary ban on Muslim migration from countries with a history of radical Islam.
“We welcome President Obama’s principled defense of both the American Muslim community and the American values of religious freedom and respect for diversity,” said CAIR’s co-founder, Nihad Awad. “We call on Donald Trump to end his use of divisive anti-Muslim and un-American rhetoric and to respect the Constitution and our nation’s religious and ethnic pluralism.”
The support from CAIR could be a political problem for Obama. In 2009, a federal judge concluded that the FBI has “ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR… with [the Jew-hating jihad group] Hamas.”
The endorsement by the HAMAS-linked CAIR came after Obama angrily swiped at Trump’s increasingly popular reform plan to limit the immigration of people from Muslim countries. The two Obama June 14 statements endorsed by CAIR were:
If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims as a broad brush, and imply that we are at war with the entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them … We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States to bar all Muslims from immigrating into America. And you hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complacent in violence …
Where does this stop? The Orlando killer, one of the San Bernardino killers, the Fort Hood killer – they were all U.S. citizens. Are we going to start treating all Muslim-Americans differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating them because of their faith?… That’s not the America we want.
In general, Obama argues that jihad killer are “radicalized” by outside “extremists,” not by the supremacist and belligerent commandments in Muslim scriptures. For example, he declared June 14 that “it is increasingly clear … that the killer took in extremist information and propaganda over the Internet. He appears to have been an angry, disturbed, unstable young man who became radicalized … These lone actors or small cells of terrorists are very hard to detect and very hard to prevent.”
“These are not religious warriors. They are thugs and they are thieves,” Obama insisted in the face of pro-Islamic boasts and justifications from multiple domestic Islamic jihadis.
Since 2011, Obama has pushed a plan dubbed “Countering Violent Extremism” which encourages federal, state and local law-enforcement officials to delegate some of their law-enforcement duties to self-declared Islamic leaders, even though many or most Muslims in American do not want to segregate themselves into Islamic-run neighborhoods. For example, Obama’s plan says local Islamic groups should be allowed to intercede or even replace routine law-enforcement investigations so that young Muslim men are diverted from actual violence without being sent to jail.
In contrast, the FBI does not delegate anti-MS-13 gang activities to local Catholic churches.
Obama’s CVE plan has failed to block many jihad attacks by immigrant Muslims or even the US-born sons of Muslims — such as December 2015 San Bernardino massacre of 14 Americans and the June 2016 massacre of 49 Americans at a gay nightclub in Orland, Fla.
One reason for the failure of Obama’s CVE plan is opposition by many Islamic groups, an activist admitted on a new blog post by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which is the group mostly used by the White House for Islamic outreach.
“Many in the American Muslim community believed engaging in a conversation around extremism would indicate that the American Muslim community bore responsibility for the extremism and accepted it as being widespread,” admitted Hoda Hawa, MPAC’s advocacy director.
For example, “the leadership of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California overwhelmingly rejected the program, “ another Muslim advocate, Ahmed Shaikh,boasted March 3, 2016. He continued;
The premise that Mosque leaders have the ability to identify future criminality in their own community is troublesome … leaders do not generally conduct programing at Mosques with a view towards terrorism prevention. Places of worship are not extensions of the national security state … some Muslim leaders believe the grim politics of our day requires the existence of such a product … [but] Muslim leaders should still stay away from this program, as it has no benefit [to Muslims].
The broad opposition to Obama’s CVE strategy was sketched out by another Islamic advocate, Margari Aziza Hill.
Linda Sarsour wrote an article with Deepa Iyer on the CVE summit and appeared on Rachel Maddow Show to talk about the discussion around Islam and terrorism in politics. Haroon Manjlai, Public Affairs Coordinator of Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA), explains to me, “Given the potential of CVE programs to impact first amendment freedoms and protected activities and its potential of criminalizing the Muslim community, [there] is a cause for concern and it is something that CAIR does not agree to and sign off [on].” In an op-ed in AlJazeera, Abdul Sattar Ghazali recounts how Keith Ellison, the first Muslim American representative in congress explained how the, “targeting and prosecution of Muslims only reinforces extremist behavior.”
The CAIR group is so closely entwined with Islamists and with jihadis that court documents and news reports show that at least five of its people — either board members, employees or former employees — have been jailed or repatriated for various financial and terror-related offenses.
Breitbart has also published evidence highlighted by critics showing that CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Texas-based criminal effort to deliver $12 million to the Jew-hating HAMAS jihad group, that CAIR was founded with $490,000 from HAMAS, and that the FBI bans top-level meetings with CAIR officials. “The FBI policy restricting a formal relationship with CAIR remains … [but] does not preclude communication regarding investigative activity or allegations of civil rights violations,” said an Oct. 2015 email from FBI spokesman Christopher Allen.
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