After the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ chief was outed as praising Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities, the White House this week quietly cut CAIR from its “strategy” on fighting antisemitism.
But why include it in the first place?
“I was happy to see people breaking the siege and [walking] into their own land,” crowed Nihad Awad, CAIR’s co-founder and national executive director, last month on a video circulated by the Middle East Media Research Institute this week.
“The people of Gaza have the right to self-defense,” he added, and “Israel as an occupying power does not have that right.”
Back in May, the White House made the group part of its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism”; CAIR was to “educate religious communities” on protecting their “houses of worship from hate incidents” and “developing strong relationships with other faith communities.”
Sometime Thursday, the White House scrubbed CAIR out of its online fact sheet on the strategy.
But it was nuts to include it six months ago — especially in a fight against antisemitism.
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CAIR’s founders and leaders have serious links to bitterly antisemitic Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. It was once named an unindicted co-conspirator in illegal fundraising for Hamas terrorists.
The left-leaning Anti-Defamation League says CAIR’s leaders “often traffic in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric,” as Awad & Co. “have infused their criticism of Israel with explicit antisemitic ideas that portray the mainstream American Jewish community as duplicitous and overly powerful.”
Awad claims his remarks last month are being taken out of context and that he condemns Hamas’ attacks — but at the same time confirms he regards all of Israel as occupied land from which Palestinians were “ethnically cleansed.” (Hmm: Palestinian Arabs are a fifth of Israel’s citizens.)
The Bidenites plainly included CAIR in the anti-antisemitism strategy in an effort to pretend antisemitism only comes from the right, and to suggest a united front against both antisemitism and “Islamophobia,” which Democrats insist on painting as an equal threat.
If only: Recall that it took Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s call for genocide against Israelis to finally get the House to censure her, yet Dems have let her and other Squad members dabble in antisemitism with nary a peep long before that.
Indeed, an alarming number of staffers in the Biden Executive Branch have openly bashed his policies as too soft on Israel; his administration is rife with anti-Israel and antisemitic bias.
Nor is enlisting CAIR to fight antisemitism the only example of Team Biden’s tone-deafness on antisemitism: Just days after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, it made a big show of unveiling a plan to address . . . Islamophobia.
If the Bidenites truly want to fight antisemitism, they could start by rejecting it — unequivocally — themselves.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/12/08/opinion/white-houses-team-up-with-cair-is-over-and-thats-good/