Interfering with counter-terror efforts

In July 2019, with CAIR’s backing, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) targeted the FBI terror database. CNS News reported that Omar “and ten other House Democrats have written to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, requesting information about how information from the FBI-administered terrorist watchlist is shared with foreign governments – including governments with poor human rights records. In doing so, she pointed to the support of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a sometimes controversial group that has mounted legal challenges against the watchlist, formally known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).”

CAIR’s resistance to counterterror efforts has been going on for years. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism:

CAIR has a long history of undermining law enforcement counter terror investigations by urging Muslims not to cooperate with agents, falsely accusing the FBI of using excessive force and by crying entrapment when stings lead to arrests of Muslims who plotted attacks.

• Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR-SFBA), tells the Muslim community to avoid talking to law enforcement, vilifies the FBI, and claims that it unfairly targets the Muslim community. In February 2011, her CAIR chapter’s website featured a poster for an event that said “Build a Wall of Resistance; Don’t Talk to the FBI.” The poster featured a sinister looking FBI agent lurking in front of people’s doors. In December 2011, Billoo discounted the arrests of two individuals accused by the FBI of plotting to bomb targets in Oregon and Maryland. “What the FBI came and did was enable them to become actual terrorists,” she said. The FBI “is creating these huge terror plots where they don’t exist.”
• [CAIR-Florida’s Hasan] Shibly has accused the FBI of pressuring Muslim youth to become government informants. In a November 4, 2014 post quoting the Los Angeles Times, he asserted he had represented 33 clients in that year alone “who claimed they had been pressured by the FBI to release information on their religious beliefs and practices.” He cited some examples: “In Orlando, they pressured one citizen who happened to be Muslim to spy on mosques, Islamic restaurants and hookah lounges or they would throw him in jail...In another case, they approached an imam with pictures of a woman they claimed would testify of an affair unless he helped them. These are law-abiding Muslims, not criminals.” In a November 13, 2014 op-ed in the Tampa Tribune, Shibly spoke against the FBI’s recruitment of American Muslim informants: “The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has documented how the FBI has targeted law-abiding American Muslims for interrogation and coerced recruitment as agent provocateurs. According to Trevor Aaronson, executive director of the Florida Center for Investigative Journalism, such FBI tactics are similar to that used by the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) against the African-American civil rights movement decades ago and has included engaging in blackmail, extortion and threats of harm to self, family and friends. Coerced individuals are then forced into mosques to promote radical violent extremism — using taxpayer dollars — to unstable and mentally disturbed youths. [Emphasis added] “These programs are not only contrary to the protections enshrined in the Constitution, but are ineffective and make our nation less safe and less free. Even with the rise of Islamic State, those engaging in acts of terrorism on U.S. soil have more often attended churches or synagogue than mosques, and yet the FBI is not engaging in similar tactics against the Christian or Jewish communities— nor should they.”
• In a May 2015 Facebook post, CAIR-LA chief Hussam Ayloush wrote, “...FBI-paid informants hired to entrap feeble-minded young Muslim men. Both sources of such hatred and violence are bad news.” In an earlier Twitter post he posited, “Is the FBI now going to send informants to entrap, radicalize, then arrest young Jewish Americans joining Israel's terrorist army?”
• At the November 2014 CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) banquet, Nihad Awad condemned government spying on Muslim Americans. “And we cannot allow our government to spy on American Muslims just because they’re active and just because they have point of views different than the government....We cannot allow the police department in New York to spy on Muslims, on Muslim businesses, on schools, on shops, just because they are Muslim, under this guise of national security.” Responding to a Department of Justice initiative to fingerprint and photograph nearly 100,000 foreigners who were already in the country in an effort to weed out suspected terrorists, Nihad Awad said, in June 2002, “What is next? Forcing American Muslims to wear a star and crescent as a means of identification for law enforcement authorities?”
• In 2010, CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid said that “the FBI, by using informants acting as agent provocateurs, has recruited more so called extremist Muslims than al Qaeda themselves.” The “Bronx Four,” James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and LaGuerre Payen, were arrested in May 2009 and indicted in June on charges they plotted to attack two targets in New York: a synagogue and New York National Guard Base in Newburgh. During a radio interview after the arrests, Walid accused the FBI of “manufacturing their own terrorism suspects to give the appearance that they’re actually doing something tangible in the so called ‘War on Terrorism.’” The FBI is “cultivating and inciting people towards extremism,” he said. Only a few days after Walid gave the above interview, he authored a blog post on the “Bronx Four.” In what Walid described as a “so-called terror plot,” he said that the “agent provocateur was the real mastermind.” “Three of these men were petty criminals, who were enticed by money, not extreme ideology,” said Walid.

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When federal investigators began looking into the disappearances of Somali Muslim men in Minnesota, and it turned out that they had returned to Somalia to wage jihad with the al Qaeda-linked group al Shabaab, Muslims who opposed this jihad accused CAIR of hindering the investigation and trying to prevent from them speaking with law enforcement officials.

In June 2009, a Somali Muslim named Abdirizak Bihi, whose nephew, Burhan Hassan, was killed in Somalia, held a protest against CAIR in Minneapolis, denouncing it for encouraging Muslims not to speak with the FBI. “We don’t want anyone to come into our community and tell us to shut up,” said Bihi. “Law enforcement will not be able to do anything without information from the community.” Protesters chanted, “CAIR out! Doublespeak out!” Another protester, Osman Ahmed, said he and other relatives of Burhan Hassan thought CAIR, for all its claims of moderation, was actually on the side of the jihadists: “They are supporting the groups we suspect of recruiting our kids. We refuse to be silent.”

Bihi later told the House Committee on Homeland Security that “CAIR held meetings for some members of the community and told them not to talk to the FBI, which was a slap in the face for the Somali American Muslim mothers who were knocking on doors day and night with pictures of their missing children and asking for the community to talk to law enforcement about what they know of the missing kids.”

CAIR’s interference bore bitter fruit in late September 2013, when al-Shabaab jihadists, including several Muslims from the United States, stormed an upscale mall in Nairobi and murdered upwards of seventy people, after freeing the Muslims and declaring that they only wanted to kill non-Muslims. In a case of spectacularly poor timing, just two days before the massacre CAIR released a report on “Islamophobia” entitled Legislating Fear: Islamophobia and its Impact in the United States, in which it harshly criticized Rep. Peter King (R-NY) for holding a series of hearings on Muslim radicalization in the United States, including one on al Shabaab recruitment in America. “In his opening statement for the hearing,” the CAIR report said, “King cited an incident in Minneapolis, saying, ‘When one cleric spoke out against al-Shabaab
inside the Minneapolis mosque where many of the missing young Somali-American men had once worshiped, he was physically assaulted, according to police.’

This statement is noteworthy as it continued King’s line of factually inaccurate attacks on the Muslim community.” The report complained that King had painted Somali Muslims in Minneapolis as uncooperative with investigators, when in fact, it said, “law enforcement officials had indicated a Somali community in Minnesota that was concerned and helpful” – an ironic charge given how angry Somali Muslims who wanted to help law enforcement were toward CAIR for trying to stop them.

Abdirizak Bihi lamented after the Kenya mall jihad murders: “I tried to warn America,” but CAIR worked hard to stop him, even calling him an “Islamophobe” in their September 2013 report on “Islamophobia.” Bihi echoed numerous other foes of CAIR in explaining their tactics: “They say that I am a bad person, that I am anti-Muslim, and that I don’t represent a hundred percent the Somali community. They lie about my life most of the time and try to destroy my character, my capability, and my trust in the community."