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CAIR Stands by Hamas (Glen Reinsford)
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Give credit where credit is due. Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations) held a staring contest last Tuesday and CAIR blinked.
The meeting between the Senator and officials from CAIR was held at CAIR’s request to “resolve” the issue of an award that had been bestowed to a local CAIR operative and then subsequently rescinded based on the Senator’s concerns about the organization. As expressed to the media, the concerns involved “past statements and actions by the group" and “allegations” of CAIR’s ties to terrorist organizations, particularly Hamas.
Hamas is a well-known Palestinian terrorist group that has been responsible for the murders of hundreds of Israelis, the vast majority of whom have been civilians. Some of its victims were American citizens as well. The group’s specialty is to send suicide bombers into shopping malls, cafes and onto passenger buses with the promise of Islamic paradise as a reward for the horror inflicted on Jewish civilians in the name of Allah.
The organization’s bomb makers, who often wear a green logo printed with the Shahada (“there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger”), equip their young “Holy Warriors” with incendiary and shrapnel devices that are designed to maximize both the death toll and the trauma of survivors. Those not killed outright in the hundreds of Hamas attacks often suffer disfigurement, loss of limbs, reduced mobility, chronic pain, and permanent damage to soft organs including the brain.
It doesn’t take a great deal of common sense for Islamic groups like CAIR to know that improving Islam’s image and salvaging the religion from reasonable accusations that it accommodates violence and terror has to begin with specifically condemning terrorist organizations like Hamas by name. Hamas not only deliberately murders innocent people in barbaric fashion, but it does so expressly in the name of Islam.
Yet, not only has CAIR refused to condemn Hamas as a terrorist group in the past, its leaders are still unable to bring themselves to do so now - even with the organization’s credibility and reputation so clearly on the line. The result of the meeting with Boxer was that the Senator refused to reinstate the award, and (understandably) reaffirmed her original concerns about CAIR.
For its part, CAIR served up the weak excuse that it isn’t its job to “classify who’s a terrorist and who’s not.”
Others offer a more realistic explanation.
Liberal Senators Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin have noted CAIR’s “associations” and “intimate links” with Hamas and other organizations that support terror. CAIR officials and associates have been convicted of funding terrorism. A U.S. court even found CAIR’s parent organization, the Islamic Association of Palestine, to be partially liable for the murder of an American teenager at the hands of Hamas gunmen.
In addition to this, Hamas enjoys deep popularity in the Islamic world. The extremist elements from which CAIR has received a great deal of money have even been known to openly root for Osama Bin Laden. As such, CAIR has managed to denounce Osama by name only once (three months after 9/11). And, for all of the bloody carnage wreaked by Hamas over the years, only a single incident appears to have met CAIR’s standard of disapproval (the Passover bombing of 2002).
Brushing aside any obligation to specifically condemn terrorists and their acts, CAIR prefers to play word games when pressed into a corner. The group often claims, for example, that it has denounced “all acts of terrorism,” even though it most certainly has not. What it has done in the past is offer rare and selective criticism of a tiny handful of high-profile attacks (such as 9/11 and the Passover bombing) while adamantly refusing even to acknowledge over 99 percent of deadly Islamic violence against innocent people.
in fact, CAIR’s feeble claim that it condemns “all acts of terrorism” is based merely on its own statements to that effect, which make it entirely meaningless. If offering blanket denunciations had any real value, then the organization would simply announce that it condemns all instances of Muslim-American offense, for example, instead of going to great lengths detailing and publicizing each and every complaint.
CAIR has nothing to say when Sudanese Muslims enslave Christians or when 200,000 Darfurians are massacred (as they have been over the last four years), but if a civilian is accidentally killed by an Israeli missile strike against terrorists whom the Palestinians refuse to arrest, then the outrage from CAIR is immediate and specific. Like other supremacist organizations, from the Klan to the Nazis, CAIR sees no reason to extend the mantle of humanity beyond its own identity.
At the end of the day, CAIR reflects the self-absorption and moral distortion that is rampant in the Islamic world, where relevance and ethics are determined only by how Muslims are affected. Deliberate and sadistic acts in the name of Islam are usually ignored, while the highest degree of petulance and lamentation is attached to anything that offends the delicate sensibilities of Muslims.
If CAIR’s mission statement is to enhance an understanding of the religion that it holds supreme, then it is surely succeeding. Given the group’s arrogant disregard for victims of terrorism, and its extraordinary reluctance to condemn specific perpetrators and acts of Islamic violence when they occur, the unflattering conclusions reached by many observers about Islam itself are only to be expected.
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