“And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege…Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense.” — Nihad Awad, Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Discover the Networks’ file on Nihad Awad:

Nihad Awad was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. After high school he moved to Italy and then to the United States, where he studied civil engineering at the University of Minnesota in the 1990s. Awad subsequently worked at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.

By way of the Bosnian Refugee Committee—an Islamic aid organization based in Minnesota—Awad in late 1992 spent a month in war-torn Bosnia during a time when Muslims from around the world were flocking there to wage jihad. Awad had previously written admiringly of the Bosnian Army soldiers who, by his telling, “courageously [stood] up to the might of Serbian tanks and planes” and “wore patches carrying the Islamic declaration of faith.” A news report from that time period cited the presence in Bosnia of an “Islamic foreign legion” of “mujahedeen” that included “Afghan guerrillas, Egyptian terrorists, Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, [and] Iranian special forces and Revolutionary Guard operatives.” Another report indicated that many of these mujahedeen had entered Bosnia “posing as relief workers.”

In 1993, Awad, who had developed into an increasingly outspoken advocate for the rights of Palestinians, became the public-relations director of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP)—a front group for Hamas. Soon thereafter, he also accepted a position as a contributing editor for the IAP publication, Muslim World Monitor. Read full file.

About the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)

Discover the Networks’ file on CAIR:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as a “non-profit, grassroots membership organization … established to promote a positive image of Islam and Muslims in America,” to protect Muslims from hate crimes and discrimination, and to present “an Islamic perspective on issues of importance to the American public.” According to the Council’s Director of Communications, Ibrahim Hooper, “We are similar to a Muslim NAACP.” As of June 2007, CAIR claimed 32 branch affiliates in the United States and one in Canada.

CAIR was co-founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, Omar Ahmad, and Rafeeq Jaber, all of whom had close ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by senior Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook and functioned as Hamas’ public relations and recruitment arm in the United States. Awad and Ahmad previously had served, respectively, as IAP’s Public Relations Director and President. Thus it can be said that CAIR was an outgrowth of IAP.

CAIR opened its first office in Washington, DC, with the help of a $5,000 donation from the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), a self-described charity founded by Mousa Abu Marzook. In May 1996, CAIR coordinated a press conference to protest the decision of the U.S. government to extradite Marzook for his connection to terrorist acts performed by Hamas. CAIR characterized the extradition as “anti-Islamic” and “anti-American.” When President Bush closed HLF in December 2001 for collecting money “to support the Hamas terror organization,” CAIR decried his action as “unjust” and “disturbing.”

From its inception, CAIR has sought to portray itself as a moderate, mainstream organization, and as early as 1996 its officials became frequent guests at State Department and White House events. In the aftermath of 9/11, when the Bush administration tried to reassure American Muslims that Islam was not the target of the war on terrorism, CAIR officials were prominent among the invitees. CAIR was the main Islamic group to gain U.S. media access in the post-9/11 period, providing the “Muslim view” of the terrorist attacks and of America’s response to them. As self-acclaimed Muslim spokesmen, CAIR officials typically refused to “simplify the situation” by blaming Osama bin Laden for the attacks on America. Moreover, while they eventually were induced by journalists to condemn Palestinian suicide terror in a pro forma manner, they hedged their disavowals by describing it as an understandable response to Israeli brutality.

Contending that American Muslims are the victims of wholesale repression, CAIR has provided sensitivity training to police departments across the United States, instructing law officers in the art of dealing with Muslims respectfully.

CAIR has long claimed that U.S. foreign policy is dictated largely by Zionist extremists. As Evan McCormick of the Center for Security Policy put it in 2003: “By convincing moderate Muslims that they are being targeted unfairly by the Bush administration’s [anti-terror] policies, CAIR incites fear in members of that demographic. If innocent Muslims are then convinced that they will be the target of government action, then they have no incentive to reject an extremist ideology that resists the government’s anti-terror policies. … This is the essence of CAIR’s strategy: shock moderate Muslims about the motivations of the U.S. Government, turn them into post-[9/11] victims, and then recruit them as supporters for your political agenda when they are ripe for the taking.”

Read the full profile on CAIR.

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