Muslim Mafia (5 page)

“CAIR is very concerned about its reputation in the community. Without the community
(
and Allah’s help
)
CAIR would fail.”

—From internal “status report” by CAIR’s Civil Rights Department
¹

T
HE BOARD MEMBERS
of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations were in full panic mode. Usually the group that calls itself the largest Muslim rights organization in America—the “Muslim NAACP”—threatens to sue non-Muslims. But this time, Muslims were threatening to sue CAIR.

And these angry constituents’ timing could not have been worse. It was early 2008, and terrorism charges and bad press were taking their toll on CAIR’s fundraising efforts. Just as the group was preparing to launch a major new money drive in the Muslim community, its operations director, Khalid Iqbal, informed the board that the organization was “inundated with phone calls” from angry Muslim clients complaining they’d been “scammed” by one of CAIR’s attorneys.
²

One brother, Issameldin Mohamed, “is verry [
sic
] upset and wants CAIR to return his money,” according to an office log of complaints.
³
He thought CAIR had filed for his immigration papers but now felt that he “was scammed” and threatened to take CAIR to court. A Sister Taqwa called “extremely angry and threatened to sue CAIR” for the money she’d lost.
⁴
And, according to an interoffice memo, “Br. Ahmed Obaid called threatening to sue CAIR” to recover his $9,000.
⁵

And on it went. Some thirty desperate victims and their families flooded CAIR with complaints and Iqbal struggled to field them all.

The situation had reached a “crisis,” Iqbal warned CAIR executive director Nihad Awad and other board members, according to a series of internal email messages they’d hoped would never be disclosed.
⁶
And it was spinning out of his control.

What is the “board recommendation?” Iqbal pleaded. “This case has taken a lot of my time.”
⁷

Indeed it was a full-blown scandal. Dozens of Muslim immigrants seeking CAIR’s help with citizenship delays, many of them indigents, had lost tens of thousands of dollars in legal and other fees and were demanding their money back. They’d been ripped off in a massive criminal fraud orchestrated by CAIR’s “resident attorney” and “civil rights manager” for its Maryland and Virginia chapters. Jamil Morris Days wasn’t even a licensed attorney; he was a con artist with a long rap sheet.
⁸
And not surprisingly, he didn’t provide the services he’d promised. Yet CAIR knew about his malpractice and kept him on board anyway.

Some victims had to sell their cars, their furniture—even their refrigerators—to pay CAIR’s bogus legal bills. The nonprofit group isn’t supposed to accept money for any casework. Some lost their immigration status because their paperwork had been bungled or, in some cases, not even been filed with the proper government agencies.

Now a handful threatened to not only sue but go to the media with their stories, which would take the scandal outside any control of CAIR and into the court of public opinion.

“Three brothers came together,” Iqbal noted in one CAIR document, “threatening to go to the media.”
⁹

With the scandal mushrooming out of control, CAIR’s board decided to shift to “damage control” mode, emails reveal. It was imperative, they asserted, to “safeguard CAIR’s name and reputation,”
¹⁰
and do whatever necessary to prevent news of the scandal from leaking out to the authorities or to the press.

Forget making whole the aggrieved Muslim clients it deigns to protect. Above all, protect the organization.

So CAIR’s directors ordered actions that effectively swept the scandal under the rug, including:

They quietly fired the attorney and closed down his office and the entire Maryland-Virginia chapter. They removed his name from the directory. They scripted a terse message to leave on the office answering machine to screen irate callers, trying to disown their dirty lawyer as only a “contractor” (which was news to his clients):

Then they disconnected the phone lines. They even got rid of Iqbal, who took a job with a Muslim Brotherhood mosque affiliated with CAIR and not far from the CAIR chapter in Herndon, Virginia, where Days worked (and where Iqbal kept an office when he wasn’t working out of CAIR’s headquarters on the other side of the Potomac). Just three years earlier, Iqbal had opened that chapter because, as CAIR said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, “there is a dire need for CAIR’s physical presence in this area.”

Suddenly there was no need and the chapter was shuttered. Today there’s hardly a trace the office ever existed. CAIR did everything to cover Days’s and Iqbal’s tracks short of removing their fingerprints.

They say in Washington that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. And this case is no exception, although both are bad.

Consider client-victim Kadiatu Korama, who paid CAIR “from mortgage money” and was in a “desperate situation.” Or Chokri el-Kotel, who had to “sell [a] car to get the money” to pay CAIR’s fake lawyer.
¹³

HUSH MONEY

Yet there was little sympathy for the victims at CAIR’s headquarters. For those victims who wouldn’t go away quietly, CAIR’s lawyers played the kind of hardball they usually reserve for
kaffirs
. They tried to frighten and intimidate them into silence by demanding they sign a secrecy agreement in violation of professional ethics.

The nondisclosure agreement also alleges to release CAIR from any legal claims in the fraud scheme in exchange for paying partial restitution to CAIR’s victims—that is, hush money.

Adding insult to injury, CAIR threatened to turn around and sue
its victims
each for $25,000 if they talked about the settlement or the “incident” with “any third party,” including the media or the police. According to the release form, the fee would cover “damages in the amount of $25,000 for the purpose of conducting meetings, workshops, press releases, flyers, and the like to reverse or minimize the damage to CAIR’s reputation caused by the recipient’s breach” of the agreement to remain quiet about the “incident.”
¹⁴

CAIR calls the silence clause and the penalty for breaching it “standard legal practice.”
¹⁵
But its victims say it feels more like a threat—a thuggish tactic, to be sure.

Legal analysts say the settlement agreement, which several victims signed, contains none of the exceptions typically found in such confidentiality provisions, such as an exception to permit disclosure to government authorities. They also doubt it is binding. Nor does it absolve CAIR of liability, since lawyers cannot escape disciplinary action in malpractice cases by simply reimbursing the client for any loss. And this certainly was a case of “malpractice,” something even CAIR acknowledges in its internal memos.
¹⁶

Though CAIR is not technically a law firm, its lawyers drafted the release form, and its lawyers covered up for Days’s malpractice, thereby joining the malpractice—and the liability. And it was CAIR’s national legal counsel Nadhira al-Khalili who agreed to drive to the Herndon office and bring the incriminating Days evidence back to CAIR’s headquarters without ever turning it over to police.
¹⁷
What’s more, CAIR’s legal team at no point informed its client-victims that Days was terminated for fraud and was not, in fact, a lawyer.

When CAIR discovered the fraud, it joined the fraud by covering it up and deliberately set out to conceal the truth about Days, not just from the authorities and the media, but from the clients he defrauded. The only thing CAIR’s headquarters told his defrauded clients when they called was that he no longer worked for CAIR. That’s it.

Why? In a word, money. Immigration cases are big business for CAIR, a hook for bringing in fundraising revenue, which CAIR desperately needs. Immigrants account for a large segment of the Muslim community. If word got out that CAIR mishandles their cases, even steals from them, it would hurt donations from the community at large.

For that matter, CAIR amid the scandal had launched a $250,000 fundraising campaign touting its mission of helping Muslims who confront immigration and citizenship problems.