On Friday, November 22, the “30th anniversary gala” of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), took place in Washington, DC, at which it celebrated “the American Muslim community’s political power and impact on the 2024 election.”
Among those who addressed the crowd were Representatives Jamaal Bowman (whose numerous indiscretions lost him reelection) and Ilhan Omar (who famously tweeted about how “Israel has hypnotized the world,” and asserted that the “Benjamins” are the reason for Congress’ support for Israel).
The event was chaired by Linda Sarsour (who once cautioned that Israelis must not be “humanized”).
Must’ve been a fun night! Too bad you probably missed it.
Little did the celebrants know that some bad news (at least for them) lay on the horizon, and it arrived just three days later.
A full appreciation of what happened requires some background.
CAIR, of course, has a somewhat—as they say—checkered history.
Some 20 years ago, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism financing case. In 2010, US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government had presented “ample evidence to establish the association” of CAIR with Hamas.
And almost exactly a year ago, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, speaking at an American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) convention in Chicago, characterized Hamas’ savage October 7 attack on Israel as the effort of some “people” who “only decided to break the siege walls of the concentration camp,” and expressed how happy he was to “see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their own land.”
He added further his conviction that those honorable, virtuous strollers have “the right to self-defense…[whereas] Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.”
The Biden White House quickly condemned Mr. Awad’s words “in the strongest terms,” calling them “shocking [and] anti-Semitic.” And severed all ties with CAIR.
Mr. Awad later asserted that his words—but of course!—were taken “out of context.”
It’s hard to imagine how one could possibly defame an organization that has already so utterly defamed itself.
But, despite all the mud already caked on CAIR, it managed to slather some more on itself in 2021 by shouting “defamation!” when a former employee, Lori Saroya, alleged that her erstwhile employer had engaged in discrimination, harassment, retaliation, union busting, financial mismanagement, lack of board oversight, board incompetence; and that it created a hostile work environment and—surprise! surprise!—has ongoing ties to terrorist groups and funding by foreign governments.
CAIR responded to those assertions with a lawsuit (which it later dropped) against Ms. Saroya; and, at the start of 2022, with a press release denouncing her use of email and social media to “cyberstalk, smear, and undermine” the organization.
Big mistake, that. Oh, but what a delicious one.
Because that disgruntled press release opened the door wide for Ms. Saroya to file a lawsuit of her own, accusing CAIR of defaming her.
CAIR is (laughably, but still) a registered nonprofit charitable organization; and, so, its financial records don’t have to be publicly disclosed. But since part of Ms. Saroya’s complaint involved CAIR’s denial of her accusation that it retains funding connections with terrorist groups and foreign governments, the federal judge presiding over the case, Minnesota District Judge David Schultz, ruled last week that information regarding the organization’s financial history and assets were well within the “scope of permissible discovery”—“discovery” being the pre-trial process where both parties exchange information and evidence about a case—and ordered the group to reveal its funding sources.
Mr. Awad, fresh off the previous week’s gala celebration and probably feeling pretty high, must have had quite a not-so-pretty plummeting. As Ms. Saroya’s lawyer, Jeffrey Robbins, put it, the judge’s order, which was born of CAIR’s attack on its former employee, was “the mother of all legal boomerangs.” And, under the circumstances, as the defendant, not the plaintiff, of a lawsuit, CAIR can’t duck.
The boomerang’s return will knock CAIR’s financial records from its pockets. It will be interesting to see whether those documents show CAIR to be the responsible charitable, terrorism-rejecting, human rights-respecting organization it claims to be. Or something else.
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