Via FrontPage Magazine. An excerpt.
Planning to murder innocent Americans in the name of radical Islam doesn’t necessarily make one a Muslim terrorist. At least that was the opinion expressed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) after last month’s arrests of seven black men in Miami for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower and the FBI headquarters in Miami.
“Given that the reported beliefs of this bizarre group have nothing to do with Islam, (Smooth: shyeah, riiiiiiight) we ask members of the media to refrain from calling them Muslims,” read a statement from Ahmed Bedier, Director of CAIR Florida chapter.
CAIR, a supposedly moderate Muslim civil-rights group, has a history of making apologies for radical Islam. After the September 11 attacks, CAIR representatives often refused to blame Osama bin Laden because it would “simplify the situation.” CAIR even looks out for Islamic radicals on television. Kiefer Sutherland, who plays a counterterrorism agent on the series “24,” had to read a disclaimer before an episode that noted its terrorists were Muslims in order to appease CAIR, which felt that the show could “cast a shadow of suspicion over ordinary American Muslims and could increase Islamophobic stereotyping and bias.” CAIR would have more success in that department if its own member weren’t supporters of terrorism themselves. Ghassan Elashi, the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR, was convicted of supporting Hamas in 2005.
Since the rights of wrongly accused Islamic radicals like bin Laden and Elashi are the main concern of CAIR, the group believes that anti-terrorism measures should be discarded. To that end, CAIR joined with the American Muslim Council and the American Muslim alliance in February 2003 in forming a coalition to repeal and amend the Patriot Act. Criticizing American policies, not the terrorists these policies are designed to stop, is what animates CAIR.
Keyword(s): CAIR’s own self-loathing