The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) demanded that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) resign on Monday, after a controversy in which he was misquoted as saying slavery was a “necessary evil.”
In fact, he said the Founders thought so.
This is the definition of fake news.
I said that *the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil* and described how they put the evil institution on the path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln. https://t.co/SaWTTlMO7w
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 26, 2020
More lies from the debunked 1619 Project.
Describing the *views of the Founders* and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery.
No surprise that the 1619 Project can't get facts right. https://t.co/nLsb73X3Gi
— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 26, 2020
In a statement Monday, CAIR called Cotton’s remarks racist, and demanded he “resign after attempting to justify the enslavement of Black men, women and children in America by saying that it was a ‘necessary evil upon which the union was built.'”
CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell said: “Both as Muslims and as human beings, we know that evil is never necessary. Whether it is the rape, torture and enslavement of Black Americans because of the color of our skin, or the genocide of indigenous Americans, evil is simply evil. Anyone who claims otherwise should not hold public office. Tom Cotton should resign.”
Notably, Mitchell did not mention slavery in the Islamic world, which remains a problem today.
CAIR is a radical left-wing organization that often supports Democrats — and Islamists. As Breitbart News has noted:
In 2007-8, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. That case, in turn, led the FBI to discontinue its work with the organization. In 2009, a federal judge ruled that the government “produced ample evidence to establish” the ties of CAIR with Hamas, the Palestinian terror organization. The United Arab Emirates labeledCAIR a terrorist organization in 2014 (a decision that the Obama administration opposed).
CAIR has claimed in the past that American foreign policy is partly to blame for terrorism against Americans. In December 2015, the organization offered legal assistance to the family of the terrorists who killed 14 and wounded nearly two dozen other people in a terror attack on a holiday party in a local government office.
Cotton recently introduced a bill that would bar federal funds from being used to teach materials from the New York Times‘ “1619 Project,” which claims that the true founding of the United States was in 1619, with the arrival of the first slave, rather than in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence.
The project’s core essay falsely asserted that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, but won a Pulitzer Prize despite having to issue a correction.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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