CAIR Out Again With Biden Administration Over Gaza Remarks

On 8 Decem­ber 2023, The New York Times report­ed that the White House dis­tanced itself from the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) fol­low­ing con­tro­ver­sial state­ments by its exec­u­tive direc­tor, Nihad Awad. Awad expressed hap­pi­ness over Pales­tini­ans break­ing out of Gaza on Oct. 7, coin­cid­ing with a dead­ly Hamas attack on Israel. Pres­i­dent Biden’s spokesman, Andrew Bates, con­demned Awad’s remarks as “shock­ing” and “anti­se­mit­ic.” The White House, which had engaged with CAIR in dis­cus­sions on Islam­o­pho­bia and list­ed the coun­cil in a doc­u­ment on fight­ing anti­semitism, removed CAIR’s name from the doc­u­ment post-Awad’s speech. Awad claimed that his com­ments were mis­con­strued, empha­siz­ing his denun­ci­a­tion of hate against Jews and dis­tin­guish­ing between Pales­tini­ans’ sym­bol­ic defi­ance and the unac­cept­able vio­lence against civil­ians. The Coun­cil on Amer­i­can Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) describes itself as “a grass­roots civ­il rights and advo­ca­cy group and as “America’s largest Islam­ic civ­il lib­er­ties group.” CAIR was found­ed in 1994 by three offi­cers of the Islam­ic Asso­ci­a­tion of Pales­tine, part of the U.S. Hamas infra­struc­ture at that time.  Doc­u­ments dis­cov­ered in the course of the ter­ror­ism tri­al of the Holy Land Foun­da­tion con­firmed that the founders and cur­rent lead­ers of CAIR were part of the Pales­tine Com­mit­tee of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and that CAIR itself is part of the US. Mus­lim Brotherhood.

For more on CAIR, go here.