CAIR SLAMS TRUMP IMMIGRATION ORDERS AS 'RACIST'
'People of conscience everywhere must resist these actions and fight back'
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CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad speaks at a press conference in Washington, D.C., Jan. 25, 2017. From the left are CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper and Rabbi Joseph Berman. From the right are Steven Martin, communications director for the National Council of Churches, and Rabiah Ahmed of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (Screenshot of Facebook Live video)
The Council on American-Islamic Relations – an unindicted terror-funding co-conspirator that has seen more than a dozen of its leaders charged or convicted of terrorism-related crimes – accused the Trump administration of racism and religious bigotry for its plan to temporarily stop receiving immigrants and travelers from countries known to produce Islamic jihadists.
“These orders are a disturbing confirmation of Islamophobic and un-American policy proposals made during the presidential election campaign,” said CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, at a news conference Wednesday at the organization’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.
“Never before in our country’s history have we purposefully, as a matter of policy, proposed a ban on immigrants or refugees on the basis of religion or imposed a religious litmus test on those coming to this nation,” he said.
Trump is expected to issue an executive order as soon as Thursday that would immediately halt for 30 days all immigrant and nonimmigrant entry of travelers from certain countries whose citizens “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
The countries are Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.
The order, according to a draft leaked Wednesday, also halts refugee admission and resettlement from Syria for 120 days while reviews of vetting procedures are conducted. When the program is resumed, annual refugee admissions from all countries would be cut from the currently authorized level of 100,000 to 50,000.
‘Religious bigotry’
Awad, who was joined at the news conference by a Jewish rabbi and a representative of the National Council of Churches, slammed critics of his organization and its allies with the oft-repeated epithet “Islamophobe.”
“Ideological and religious questioning imposed on our government agencies by Islamophobes, many of whom now are in policy-making positions, will not make us safer and will, instead, send a very negative message that Muslims are not welcome in America.”
However, as WND reported this week, the Muslim Arab Gulf state United Arab Emirates has designated CAIR as a terrorist organization along with groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida. In 2008, the FBI cut off official contact with CAIR, citing evidence from the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial that documented the connections between CAIR and its founders to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Awad compared Trump’s policy to America’s rejection of a ship filled with Jewish refugees seeking protection from the Nazis during World War II.
“We cannot allow religious bigotry to affect our willingness and our ability to welcome those fleeing violence and persecution,” he said.
Awad insisted the policy won’t make the country safer and will stigmatize Muslims, feeding into a “false notion of an American war on Islam” and causing “a further increase in hate crimes, discrimination against Muslims.”
He described Trump’s planned wall on the U.S.-Mexico border as “a multi-billion-dollar monument to racism.”
“We must address the issue of terrorism based on evidence and hard data not based on faith, race or national origin,” he said.
‘About racism, not security’
Rabbi Joseph Berman, manager of government affairs and grassroots advocacy at the nonprofit Jewish Voice for Peace, said he comes from a family of refugees that fled the Nazis.
Suspending refugee resettlement, he said, will result in more people dying in refugee camps.
He doubted Trump’s orders were about national security.
“Make no mistake, in reality they are racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attacks on people in this country and around the world,” he said.
“People of conscience everywhere must resist these actions and fight back on these racist attacks,” said Berman.
Steven Martin, communications director for the National Council of Churches, also said the halt to refugees was motivated by “prejudice.”
“I cannot believe that a state-sponsored persecution of a class of Americans is taking place,” he said.
Muslim Brotherhood front
CAIR’s parent organization, according to FBI wiretap evidence from the terror-funding Holy Land Foundation case in Texas, was founded at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia that included CAIR Executive Director Awad. The organization, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a “media twinkle” to the Muslim leaders’ agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.
While CAIR has complained of the unindicted co-conspirator designation, as WND reported in 2010, a federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group has been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas.”
In a lawsuit CAIR filed in 2009 against an undercover investigative team that published evidence of CAIR’s ties to Islamic jihad, the group alleged its reputation was harmed, and it sought damages in court.
But a federal court in Washington determined CAIR failed to present a single fact showing it had been harmed, and the organization gave up that specific claim against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, whose findings were published in the WND Books expose, “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.”
In a May 27, 2014, ruling, the U.S. District Court in Washington observed that CAIR had been “frustratingly unclear as to the injuries at issue for each of the claims.” The court found CAIR speaks “in broad generalizations, asserting injuries and damages and proximate cause across multiple counts and multiple Plaintiffs.”
CAIR leaders have made statements affirming the aim of establishing Islamic rule in the United States.
The Islamic organization long had accused WND and others of “smearing” the Muslim group by citing a newspaper account of CAIR founder Omar Ahmad telling Muslims in Northern California in 1998 that they were in America not to assimilate but to help assert Islam’s rule over the country.
But WND caught CAIR falsely claiming that it had contacted the paper and had “sought a retraction,” insisting Ahmad never made the statement.
In a telephone conversation with WND in 2003, CAIR’s communications director, Ibrahim Hooper, insisted someone from CAIR’s California affiliate made the contact with the paper.
When confronted with the fact that the newspaper’s editors had told WND that CAIR had not contacted them and that the reporter stood by the story, Hooper abruptly ended the call, saying: “If you are going to use distortions, I can’t stop you; it’s a free country. Have a nice day.”
Minutes later, however, Hooper called back and said he wanted to change his statement to say, “We will seek a retraction, and we have spoken to the reporter about it in the past.”
But three years later, the issue arose again, and WND found CAIR still had not contacted the paper.
Hooper, himself, also has expressed a desire to overturn the U.S. system of government in favor of an Islamic state.
“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future,” Hooper said in a 1993 interview with the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “But I’m not going to do anything violent to promote that. I’m going to do it through education.”
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Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/01/trump-immigration-orders-blasted-as-racist/#exugClJwkmitzxJS.99
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