CAIR: Obama's Impossible Muslim Standard

Steve Clemons gives the Barack Obama campaign a good thrashing from the left today for the candidate's willingness to accept the resignation of his Muslim outreach coordinator, Mazen Asbahi. The Wall Street Journal reports that Asbahi, a Chicago lawyer, resigned because of questions about his ties to an Illinois-based Imam named Jamal Said who has been accused (though not indicted) of fundraising for Hamas. The two served together for a few weeks on the board of an Islamic investment fund back in 2000. Predictable smug outrage has followed on right-wing blogs.

According to the Journal, the tenuous connection between Asbahi and Said was first noted by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report, a subscription-only Web site that tracks the international activity of that Islamic party and its supporters. The WSJ says the Report is published by a "Washington think tank," but there doesn't seem to be any author or organizational affiliation mentioned on the site, and a Whois lookup yields no clues.

The Report employs a fairly loose definition of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that includes fairly mainstream organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Amusingly, recent FP contributors Graham Fuller and Marc Lynch are also described as Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers. As Passport readers know, Lynch has indeed met with senior Brotherhood leaders in Cairo, but they hardly see eye to eye. Fuller's supposed ties are of the six-degrees-of-Mahdi Akef variety.

By the standards of this site, you are not only a fellow traveler of the Muslim Brotherhood if you have defended them or recommended dialogue with them, you need only have been loosely associated with people who held those views. By this standard, there probably isn't one prominent Muslim-American in the country that Obama could hire for the campaign. Anyone he could find who has never participated in an event that includes people with sympathies Obama might not agree with is probably not actually influential enough to win him any votes.

Even in a campaign full of trumped-up outrage and guilt by association, the Asbahi affair is pretty absurd. This is roughly the equivalent of Obama throwing Chris Rock under the bus because he once appeared in a movie with the anti-semitic Mel Gibson. If nothing else, it's an indication of how rattled the Obama campaign is by all the Muslim rumors.

"a fairly loose definition of Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that includes fairly mainstream organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations."

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Dallas--In testimony Tuesday, FBI Agent Lara Burns reported before the jury in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, right alongside HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), and the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR). Agent Burns further testified that CAIR received money from HLF - a claim that Nihad Awad blatantly denied in a congressional testimony in September of 2003.

Burns also said that both Omar Ahmed and Nihad Awad, CAIR co-founders who today serve as CAIR’s chairman emeritus and executive director, respectively, were also listed as individual members the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in America.

Awad and Ahmed are further connected to the Palestine Committee based on their positions as president and public relations director of the IAP, a Hamas front group that was responsible for the dissemination of propaganda, and has since been closed down as a result of a multi-million dollar civil judgment in a trial involving the murder of an American teenager by HAMAS terrorists.

CAIR, which touts itself as America’s premier Muslim civil rights organization, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial. Burns’ testimony so far has placed both Ahmed and Awad at a 1993 Philadelphia meeting where the HAMAS members and supporters discussed a strategy to kill the Oslo Peace Accords, which threatened to marginalize HAMAS. The group also discussed ways to improve HAMAS fundraising in America.

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I wouldn't call that a loose association. I'd say CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood Affiliate based on the testimony of the FBI Agent and documentation submitted at trial.

CAIR - Collective Against Individual Rights or Islamic Collective of North America is not compatible with free individuals or western civilization. Political/Social/NGO jihad is not compatible with free individuals or western civilization.

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