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Leaders of Designated Terrorist Group Invited to State of the Union Guess who gets a front row seat to watch the President? January 12, 2016 Joe Kaufman When President Barack Obama takes the stage tonight for his State of the Union address to the American people, he will be doing so with at least two individuals associated with terrorism seated in front of him. The individuals, Nezar Hamze and Sameena Usman, are leaders of CAIR and have involvement with Islamic Relief, two groups that have been named terrorist organizations by the government of United Arab Emirates (UAE). Nezar Hamze...

Two officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations will be attending the State of the Union address Tuesday as guests of Democratic lawmakers. Reps. Zoe Lofgren (Calif.) and Alcee Hastings (Fla.) will both be hosting representatives from CAIR chapters in their respective states, the group announced Monday. Lofgren will be bringing Sameena Usman, a government relations coordinator in the San Francisco office, while Hastings will host Nezar Hamze, the chief operating officer of the nonprofit's Florida branch.

A leading Muslim advocacy group is calling for Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump to apologize after a Muslim woman was ejected from his rally in South Carolina on Friday night. "The image of a Muslim woman being abused and ejected from a political rally sends a chilling message to American Muslims and to all those who value our nation’s traditions of religious diversity and civic participation," said Nihad Awad, the executive director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in a statement. "Donald Trump should issue a public apology to the Muslim woman kicked out of his rally and make...

Cargill Meat Solutions in Fort Morgan will allow more than 150 Muslim employees to reapply for their positions following a mass termination in December. The Wichita-based company let its employees go after a misunderstanding about the company policy on prayer breaks escalated. The Somali Muslim employees are being represented by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Cargill representatives reviewed the no-call, no-show termination policy which led to the terminations and decided to allow the workers fired in the dispute to reapply for their jobs after a 30-day period, rather than the company policy of 180 days. A CAIR news release on...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The man who shot a policeman in Philadelphia and claimed to have pledged allegiance to Islamic State militants does not appear to be a mosque-going Muslim, a senior official at the largest U.S. Muslim advocacy group said. "At this hour, it does not appear that he was an observant or mosque-going Muslim" in the local community, said Jacob Bender, executive director of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "I've called numerous imams and mosques to try to see if the name rings a bell with anyone. So far it hasn't," he told Reuters in...

A Bad Day for Preferred Narratives Noah Rothman Everything was going as planned at President Barack Obama's Thursday evening town hall on gun control when the unexpected occurred. A woman, a mother, a victim of sexual assault in college, someone who according to the overly simplistic center-left perspective should be sympathetic both to Democrats and stricter gun laws, stood up and defended firearm ownership. It was a moment that demonstrated the fragility of narratives and stereotyping. It exposed just how rapidly worldviews predicated on a naïve and one-dimensional typecasting - a trap into which political demographers easily fall - can...

NYC Settles Lawsuits Over Muslim Surveillance by Police By tom hays, associated press NEW YORK -- Jan 7, 2016 The New York Police Department will strengthen safeguards against illegal surveillance of Muslims in investigations of terror threats and install a civilian representative on an advisory committee that reviews the probes under the terms of a settlement of two high-profile civil rights lawsuits, lawyers said Thursday. The announcement of a deal following months of negotiations formally ended litigation over accusations that the nation's largest police department cast a shadow over Muslim communities with a covert campaign of religious profiling and illegal...

In Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali describes her execrable life as a devout Muslim girl in Somalia, Kenya and Saudi Arabia. She explains why she became an Infidel after experiencing freedom in the Netherlands. In Heretic, she seeks a reformation of Islam, with a focus on women's rights but including tolerance and freedom of thought and speech for all. That will not happen soon, even though there are other current and former Muslims who want it and others who claim to want it. From the first page of Heretic: On ______, a group of ______ heavily armed, black-clad men burst into a...

Cargill Meat Solutions processes beef, and among their workers were more than 200 Muslim migrants who were dumped in the state with liberal promises of work and a better life. The business thought that they were doing a good thing by giving the Somalis work and even went as far as to make special accommodations for their Islamic prayer rituals on the job. That generosity backfired, which was only a matter of time. After the company's recent sudden reversal of a long-standing prayer policy offered to Muslim employees only, where they gave the workers five-minute breaks to pray throughout their...

'Taliban Imam' Gets Gun Training from CAIR Nezar Hamze teaches potential jihadists how to aim better at us. December 29, 2015 Joe Kaufman CAIR's Nezar Hamze is on a mission to give gun training to every radical mosque in Florida. This month, while Jews have been preoccupied with Hanukkah and Christians have been readying themselves for Christmas, Hamze has been not-so-quietly hopping from mosque to mosque telling those who may very well be a danger to society that they have a right to take up arms. He has done at least 16 of these training sessions. One of his...

Jihadist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris have Americans on edge. Yet part of President Obama's response to the attacks has been to invite Islamist groups that routinely demonize the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies to the White House to discuss religious discrimination. "If we're to succeed in defeating terrorism we must enlist Muslim communities as some of our strongest allies, rather than push them away," President Obama said in his speech following the San Bernardino attack. But partnering with such organizations sends the wrong message to the American people, said Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for...

A Kansas City mosque owned by an Islamic umbrella organization with deep ties to the U.S. arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has received millions of dollars in federal grants over the past several years, according to a federal spending database. The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has received $2,739,891 from the Department of Agriculture since 2010, a Daily Caller analysis has found. The money largely went to the mosque's Crescent Clinic to provide services through the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program, known as WIC. Completing this poll entitles you to Daily Caller news updates free of charge. You...

December 17, 2015 ought henceforth to be a date which will live in infamy, as that was the day that some of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives came out in favor of the destruction of the First Amendment. Sponsored by among others, Muslim Congressmen Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, as well as Eleanor Holmes Norton, Loretta Sanchez, Charles Rangel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Joe Kennedy, Al Green, Judy Chu, Debbie Dingell, Niki Tsongas, John Conyers, José Serrano, Hank Johnson, and many others, House Resolution 569 condemns "violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States." The...

There is, from the 28th to the 30th of this month, a conference being held by the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the American Islamic College on "Islam and Muslims in America" in Chicago. It is a summit of Islamic supremacists at the highest levels of national and international power. Notice how all of these Islamic organizations and groups all share the same goal, worldwide. This conference appears to be the penultimate chapter, a decidedly evil moment, in American history. The fox is in the hen-house. Here we see, up close, just how deeply the US government has been...

Step one: Find an expert with an impressive-sounding academic title to legitimize shoddy advocacy propaganda. Meet Brian Levin. He's the one-man band behind something called the "Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism" at California State University, San Bernardino. The "center" (that is: Levin) claims to be "nonpartisan" and "objective." But he is a former top staffer of the militant, conservative-smearing Southern Poverty Law Center, which was forced to apologize earlier this year after including famed black neurosurgeon and GOP 2016 candidate Ben Carson on its "extremist watch list" of hate groups. At SPLC, Levin infamously posited that the...

It's rare when a politician says something surprising, or doesn't succumb to a feel-good suggestion. Which made Rick Santorum's response to Joe Scarborough this morning doubly remarkable. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough had teed Santorum up to agree with his suggestion that we need to "reach out aggressively to let Muslim Americans know that they are every bit a part of the American dream as you or me." But Santorum turned the tables, saying "I would ask that in reverse: what are they going to do to reach out to make sure they are confronting --" Scarborough broke in: "no,...

Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz has named former Williamson County GOP chairman Kevin Kookogey, a critic of Sharia law, as his Tennessee chairman. Now, the U.S. senator is drawing fire from the Council on American-Islamic Relations which on Tuesday urged Cruz to drop Kookogey because of what the group called "his longstanding support for anti-Muslim and Islamophobic causes." In announcing Kookogey's appointment, Cruz on Monday called him "a consistently strong voice for conservative principles and an active member of our party for a number of years. "His experience and knowledge of both the landscape in Tennessee and the issues that...

In the days following the Dec. 2 attack in San Bernardino, Council for American-Islamic Relations representatives partially blamed U.S. policy for terrorist attacks, accused gunman Syed Rizwan Farook’s co-workers of making fun of his beard and sought to downplay comments by Farook’s father linking him to ISIS. Like Muslims throughout the U.S., CAIR officials condemned the attack, but too often with what sounded to critics like subtle caveats.

Sofia Ali-Khan Dec. 7, 2015 Dear Non-Muslim Allies, I am writing to you because it has gotten just that bad. I have found myself telling too many people about the advice given to me years ago by the late composer Herbert Brun, a German Jew who fled Germany at the age of 15: “be sure that your passport is in order.” It’s not enough to laugh at Donald Trump anymore. The rhetoric about Muslims has gotten so nasty, and is everywhere, on every channel, every newsfeed. It is clearly fueling daily events of targeted violence, vandalism, vigilante harassment, discrimination. I...

In the immediate aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sought to support and assist the families of the terrorist Syed Farook – before the FBI had even uttered the word "terrorism". As my colleague Joel Pollak writes at Breitbart California, the organisation, which claims it is tasked with improving relations between America and its Muslim communities took the pre-emptive step of representing Mr. Farook's family, in what Pollak describes as a terrorist family's "death benefit". CAIR's assistance and public representation of Syed Farook's family, in my opinion, closely resembles the Palestinian Authority's (PA)...