Authors: Paul Sperry
That same month, CAIR mounted a PR offensive against a report from the intelligence branch of the New York Police Department. Entitled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” the report warned that seemingly law-abiding young Muslim men in America can be turned into terrorists through jihadi indoctrination.
CAIR quickly condemned the report as racist. And a confidential CAIR memo reveals its New York operatives feverishly lobbied NYPD officials to amend the report by softening its conclusion that young Muslim men pose a high security risk.
“There are not enough
caveats
in the report to prevent profiling” of such Muslims, worried Faiza N. Ali, community affairs director for CAIR’s New York chapter.
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It’s not the first time the militant Muslim pressure group has directly interfered in internal police anti-terror operations.
After CAIR complained that police in Anaheim, California were seeking information about terrorist suspects from Muslim owners of restaurants and bookstores clustered in a part of the city known as “Little Arabia,” the Anaheim police chief reassigned part of his intelligence unit and agreed to put his entire force of seven hundred through Islamic sensitivity training taught by CAIR.
The group also torpedoed a program by Los Angeles police to map potential terror hotbeds in the Muslim community. CAIR cried “religious profiling” and joined the ACLU to kill the plan, which was announced as the FBI warned police that shopping malls in L.A. were possible al-Qaida targets.
The Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council also joined the protest. “All Muslim organizations are united in purpose to defend the rights of Muslim Americans,” said MPAC executive director Salam al-Marayati, if not necessarily united to defend the country from terrorism. (Until recently, MPAC’s political operations were headed by a three-time felon and ex-con, who will be introduced in a later chapter.)
By mapping the local Muslim community, the LAPD would increase its chances of disrupting such plots. Its counterrorism unit hoped to ID areas that might be more isolated and removed—and therefore riper targets for radicalization and even al-Qaida recruitment.
Shining a spotlight on these neighborhoods would take the terrorists and their facilitators out of the shadows where they prefer to operate.
“We just don’t know enough about the communities,” explained deputy LAPD chief Michael Downing, adding that the planned mapping project “has nothing to do with profiling.”
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But predictably, CAIR claimed Muslims were not more likely to commit violent acts than people of other faiths, ignoring overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary. Just since 9/11, more than nine thousand separate violent acts have been carried out in the name of Islam.
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As Islamic terror expert Robert Spencer points out, we don’t “see Presbyterians blowing themselves up in crowded restaurants, Buddhists flying planes into buildings, and Amish waving placards crowing that they will soon dominate the world.”
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It’s in the moderates’ best interest to help police expose the extremists. That way police can narrow their surveillance and gather more useful intelligence to protect not only society at large, but also moderate Muslims who eschew violence.
But of course, CAIR is not moderate, and it considers the police the enemy—despite its public rhetoric about helping the authorities.
In fact, there is growing evidence that CAIR is at war with police, along with the rest of the Muslim mafia.
MYTH OF MUSLIM COOPERATION
Dealing a major blow to CAIR, the FBI in 2008 cut off formal ties to the group due to its terrorist co-conspirator listing. When the disengagement policy was made public in early 2009, CAIR rallied other Muslim Brotherhood front groups to fire off a threatening letter to the FBI. The letter suggested that if the bureau didn’t restore outreach relations with CAIR, they would band together and deny the FBI information about “acts of violence” and “threats” in the Muslim community (as if they had provided such information previously).
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Calling themselves “American Muslims in the American mainstream,” this
cabal
of Muslim Brothers essentially threatened to boycott the FBI and its terrorism fighting efforts if it didn’t reopen political access for a group that supports jihad and
Shariah
law, and has been named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the war on terror.
The list of signatories to their open letter to the FBI is a veritable who’s who of Muslim Brotherhood front groups. And roughly half of the groups in its so-called American Muslim Taskforce either show up on the Justice Department’s list of co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror case or in Muslim Brotherhood manifestos and other secret documents.
Regrettably, they represent the Muslim establishment in America. And outrageously, its leaders are now declaring war on law enforcement, threatening to withhold information about sleeper terrorists or homegrown jihadists secreted within the Muslim community.
But FBI agents in Washington suspect these groups are already withholding such information. And they say they could only chuckle when they read the taskforce’s missive, entitled “U.S. Muslim Coalition Considers Suspending Relations With FBI.” They were particularly amused by the claim that CAIR and the other Muslim groups have been instrumental in preventing terrorism.
“Muslim Americans continue to be a positive and stabilizing force in keeping our nation safe and secure from acts of violence and foreign threats,” claims the letter demanding the FBI reinstate outreach with CAIR. “Despite fear-mongering by a vocal minority, Muslim Americans are natural allies of law enforcement agencies in ensuring the well-being of our nation.”
In fact, agents assert, nothing could be further from the truth.
“That’s pretty interesting, because I know the FBI can’t point to one time—not even one time—when this [Muslim] outreach program has produced any information that’s of investigative value,” says a senior FBI special agent, who works counterterrorism cases out of the Washington field office.
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Fairfax County’s return on its own politically correct outreach to CAIR and other Muslim groups isn’t any better. “The number of leads we’ve received directly related to some major [counterterrorism] investigation is zero to none,” says the high-ranking Fairfax County police official.
About the only information that CAIR has offered to law enforcement relates to civil rights infractions, they say, such as alleged hate crimes. And CAIR has wildly exaggerated anti-Muslim abuses, as we will document in a forthcoming chapter.
“They love to come to our outreach venues and bitch about their civil rights,” the senior FBI agent says.
Indeed, the American Muslim Taskforce even called its 2008 election plan: “A civil rights plus agenda,” with the “plus” focusing almost exclusively on issues of interest to Muslims. And according to its Web site, it solicits feedback from the Muslim community about civil rights more than about any other issue. Terrorism, in contrast, doesn’t even rank as an issue.
The agent says cooperation is a one-way street with CAIR and other Muslim groups. The FBI listens and responds to their complaints, but they don’t return the favor. The agency has to beg for their help in finding potential terrorists. Virtually the only kind of investigating they want the FBI doing involves hate crimes against Muslims—and CAIR lumps anti-terrorist crackdowns in with that category.
CAIR insists that it “sincerely values” the FBI and all that it does to protect the country. But more importantly, it values all that the bureau does to protect the Muslim community.
“When a hate crime is committed against Muslims or their institutions,” CAIR’s legislative director Corey Saylor says, “it is the FBI we turn to for help.” Uh-huh, and if they value the FBI, it’s mainly for that reason. And even then, they have little, if any, respect for it or other law enforcement.
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Listen to popular CAIR lecturer Zaid Shakir, for one example. He constantly belittles the agency in speeches to Muslims, even warning them that it frames Muslims for terrorism that it secretly commits. “The World Trade Center bombing of course was aided and abetted by our good friends at the FBI,” the
imam
contends in just one of the many wild-eyed conspiracy theories he peddles.
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‘RACIST, FASCIST, CRIMINAL FBI’
And a close ally of
imam
Siraj Wahhaj, a longtime CAIR advisory board member and major fundraiser, spews anti-FBI venom at Wahhaj’s mosque in Brooklyn. Al-Hajj Idris Muhammad warns Muslims that the FBI is racist and “will fabricate a case against you.” He advises followers to refuse cooperation:
Never speak with the racist, fascist, criminal FBI. Never allow them in your home or office without a warrant. Have your attorney advise the racist, fascist, criminal FBI never to approach or harass you or any soldier in your Muslim community or political organization. If the racist, fascist, criminal FBI authorizes its criminal agents to harass the believers in your
masjid
(mosque), community or organization, you must alert all of the believers not to cooperate with the racist, fascist, criminal FBI.
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While CAIR says it encourages its members to cooperate with the FBI, it privately counsels them to clam up.
“They’re trying to paint the picture that they’re such a valuable tool to law enforcement,” says the senior FBI officer in Washington. “Yet they tell their constituents: Don’t speak to law enforcement.”
In fact, CAIR distributes a “Muslim community safety kit” at mosques that advises Muslims to “Know your rights.” Remember, it warns, if you are visited by agents:
You do not have to talk to the FBI. You have no obligation to talk to the FBI, even if you are not a citizen. Never meet with them or answer any questions without an attorney present.
You do not have to permit them to enter your home or office…. Even if they have a warrant, you are under no obligation to answer questions.
…It is better to refuse to answer any questions….
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Terrorist defense lawyer Ashraf Nubani, who works closely with CAIR, puts a finer point on it in a compact disc circulating in suburban Washington DC mosques:
There is no reason that anyone should ever, ever, ever talk to law enforcement as Muslims in the United States. The FBI is just a tool of whoever is wielding it. And right now it is very bad, it is very bad, it is very bad.
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Remarkably, some of the
imams
who preach at these mosques, such as the ADAMS Center near Herndon, and who allow these CDs to be distributed, serve on the FBI advisory committee set up after 9/11 to alert the FBI to both terrorist threats and anti-Muslim crimes. Little wonder the only tips the FBI gets deal with the latter.
Dar al-Hijrah, the 9/11 mosque, has even “ex-communicated members who they suspected of cooperating with us,” says an FBI case agent whose beat includes Dar al-Hijrah, which he describes as a “hotbed” of terrorist activity.
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During the last presidential election, GOP congressman Pete King of New York wondered why so many mosques around the country “don’t cooperate with law enforcement.”
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The reason is now clear: CAIR and its allies are telling them not to.
But more than that, they’re coaching them to mislead investigators and obstruct their terrorism investigations.
The smoking-gun evidence is contained in a six-page confidential report generated by a senior CAIR official, who on the third anniversary of 9/11 helped a prominent Muslim figure under FBI inquiry to obstruct a line of questioning by agents.
In September 2004, a pair of agents arranged an interview with the Muslim leader of a Maryland mosque that the FBI was investigating for suspicious activity. The mosque leader alerted CAIR, and CAIR sent Shama Farooq, then the civil rights director for its Maryland chapter, to coach him through the interview.
Farooq wrote a detailed plan covering what Dr. Sayeed Ahmed, president of the Islamic Society of Western Maryland, should and shouldn’t say. The predominantly Pakistani mosque is controlled by ISNA and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Oftentimes, these meetings are used to get information about other community members,” she warned in the plan she devised. “It is important, first of all,
not to talk about anyone else at all
” (emphasis in the original).
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‘DO NOT ADDRESS QUESTIONS RELATING TO TERRORISM’
Also, “If the agent wants contact information for anyone else,
you should not give any numbers or addresses out
—let him find the people the same [way] he found you,” she advised (emphasis in original).
Farooq also insisted Ahmed turn his cell phone off, and keep it out of the sight and reach of the agents during the interview.
Finally, she advised, “You are not required to tell them which Islamic centers you attend, how many times a day you pray, who you give charity to, and which organizations you are associated with.”