In its Nov. 18 article, “Texas Governor Declares Muslim Civil Rights Group a ‘Terrorist Organization,’” The New York Times adopts the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ narrative that its critics are nothing more than anti-Muslim bigots, completely ignoring the organization’s troubling record tying it to terror.
“Gov. Greg Abbot of Texas declared on Tuesday that one of the nation’s largest advocacy and civil rights groups is a foreign terrorist organization,” wrote The Times’ J. David Goodman. He continued:
In his declaration, Mr. Abbott said that the group, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, had direct ties to Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. The nonprofit, known by initials, CAIR, has denied having any such ties.
Sufficing with a he said/she said dispute, Goodman passed on reporting the relevant facts. In more than 700 words, he did not find the opportunity to acknowledge that in 2009, CAIR was an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history. The Holy Land Foundation and its leaders were convicted of providing material support to Hamas, and Ghassan Elashi, a co-founder of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was sentenced to 65 years in prison. The Times journalists also ignored the fact that the FBI cut ties with CAIR in 2008 due to concerns about the organization’s Hamas ties. Nor did Goodman note the United Arab Emirates’ 2014 designation of CAIR as a terror organization, which presumably was not based on anti-Muslim sentiment.
The Times was completely silent on CAIR’s long history which belies the organization’s preferred description of itself as “a civil rights organization and ‘a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding.'”
“The Paper of Record” is equally non-informative about the organization’s post-Oct. 7 activity. “CAIR has attracted intensifying scrutiny and criticism since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza,” wrote Goodman, highlighting the criticism while hiding the reason for the criticism.
As the Grey Lady itself reported in 2023, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad celebrated Hamas’ Oct. 7 invasion and brutal massacre, the most deadly slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, prompting President Biden’s administration to condemn the organization (“White House Disavows U.S. Islamic Group After Leader’s Oct. 7 Remarks“):
“We condemn these shocking, antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” said Mr. Biden’s spokesman, Andrew Bates. “The horrific, brutal terrorist attacks committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 were, as President Biden said, ‘abhorrent’ and represent ‘unadulterated evil.'” …
In a video posted online, Mr. Awad was seen seemingly celebrating and justifying the Oct. 7 attack.
“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7,” he said. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not allowed to walk in.
“And yes,” he continued, “the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”
Unlike Goodman’s article and the accompanying headline, The Times’ earlier piece did not adopt CAIR’s description of itself as “civil rights group.” At the time, correspondent Peter Baker rightly qualified this description as CAIR’s own, and did not report it as fact, stating:
CAIR has long been a controversial player in Washington, presenting itself as a champion of civil rights for Muslims in an era of Islamophobia yet regularly pilloried by many, especially on the political right, as an apologist for extremism.
Among the CAIR characters intent on depicting the organization as a leading civil rights advocate is Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the group’s San Francisco chapter. In 2015, she wrote in The New York Times:
I will speak out to protect my community and, by extension, other communities in this country. When one group is threatened, the civil liberties of all Americans are at stake.
Six years later, at an event for the American Muslims for Palestine, the CAIR official was captured on film expanding on her thoughts about the “civil liberties” of Jews and Zionists:
We need to pay attention to the Zionist synagogues. We need to pay attention to the Hillel chapters on our campuses because just because they’re your friend today doesn’t mean they have your back when it comes to human rights. So oppose the vehement fascists but oppose the polite Zionists too. They are not your friends. … Know your enemies. And I’m not going to sugarcoat that. They are your enemies.
CAIR’s anti-Jewish bigotry was again on display in recent days, with the organization’s response to Governor Abbott’s decision about the terror designation. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), CAIR invoked the dual loyalty “Israel First” charge lobbed at American Jews and associated with neo-Nazis: “Greg Abbott is an Israel First politician who has spent months stoking anti-Muslim hysteria to smear American Muslims critical of the Israeli government…”
Given the article’s erasure of the organization’s ties to terror and peddling of antisemitism, Goodman’s ill-informed readers would therefore naturally conclude that anti-CAIR criticism of the bona fide “civil rights group” is nothing more than “[a]nti-Muslim sentiment [which] has been increasingly apparent in online discussions in Texas, and in the brick-and mortar fights beyond the internet.”
Goodman dedicated a total of 10 paragraphs to what he deemed is the only relevant context of Abbott’s ruling: anti-Muslim bigotry.
Relatedly, Gov. Abbott terror designation extended to a second organization: the Muslim Brotherhood. The Hill‘s Ashleigh Fields provided a select account of the organization’s ties to terror, writing (“Abbott designates Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR as foreign terrorist organizations in Texas“)
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt that now provides social services such as pharmacies, hospitals and schools, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Past events undertaken by the group have been previously linked to violence, although its originators renounced brutal attacks in the 1970s.
Notably, Fields ignored a key point in the CFR report which she had invoked: the Muslim Brotherhood is the inspiration for two of the most vicious existing terrorist groups. About the Brotherhood’s Sayyid Qutb, “who developed a doctrine of armed struggle against the regime in Egypt and beyond while writing from prison,” CFR noted: “His work has provided the underpinnings for many militant Sunni Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas.”
Indeed, in its founding charter, Hamas describes itself as “one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.”
Prof. Lorenzo Vidino, the director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, observed in a recent paper that members and affiliates of Muslim Brotherhood branches in the West, particularly in the United States, have been convicted of financing Hamas and al-Qaeda.
For the Hebrew version of this post, which also describes how Ben Samuels‘ article in the English edition of Haaretz shares the same shortcomings as The New York Times story, please see here.