...there is another side to CAIR that has alarmed many people in positions to know. The Department of Homeland Security refuses to deal with it. Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat, New York) describes it as an organization “which we know has ties to terrorism.”[2] Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat, Illinois) observes that CAIR is “unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect.” Steven Pomerantz, the FBI’s former chief of counterterrorism, notes that “CAIR, its leaders, and its activities effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.” The family of John P. O’Neill, Sr., the former FBI counterterrorism chief who perished at the World Trade Center, named CAIR in a lawsuit as having “been part of the criminal conspiracy of radical Islamic terrorism” responsible for the September 11 atrocities. Counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson calls it “a radical fundamentalist front group for Hamas.”[3]

Of particular note are the American Muslims who reject CAIR’s claim to speak on their behalf. The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, publisher of the New Jersey-based Voice of Peace, called CAIR the champion of “extremists whose views do not represent Islam.”[4] Jamal Hasan of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance explains that CAIR’s goal is to spread “Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook.”[5] Kamal Nawash, head of Free Muslims Against Terrorism, finds that CAIR and similar groups condemn terrorism on the surface while endorsing an ideology that helps foster extremism, adding that “almost all of their members are theocratic Muslims who reject secularism and want to establish Islamic states.” Tashbih Sayyed of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance calls CAIR “the most accomplished fifth column” in the United States. And Stephen Schwartz of the Center on Islamic Pluralism writes that “CAIR should be considered a foreign-based subversive organization, comparable in the Islamist field to the Soviet-controlled Communist Party, USA.”...