US Muslim Brotherhood Group Calls on US CPAC to Cancel Hungarian Event

The Coun­cil on Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions (CAIR) has issued a state­ment call­ing on the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (CPAC) to can­cel a May 2022 event in Hun­gary, set to fea­ture the Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban as a keynote speak­er. Accord­ing to the CAIR state­ment:

April 6, 2022 We urge any Amer­i­cans who do not wish to be asso­ci­at­ed with author­i­tar­i­an­ism, racism or Putin’s war on Ukraine to boy­cott this CPAC event in Hun­gary. It makes no sense for an Amer­i­can polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion to hold an event in a for­eign coun­try with speak­ers who pro­mote fas­cism, racism and big­otry, includ­ing Islam­o­pho­bia and antisemitism.

Read the rest here.

In the state­ment, CAIR also accused Orbán of cham­pi­oning anti-immi­gra­tion poli­cies aimed at Mus­lim migrants and attempt­ing to under­mine the free press and demo­c­ra­t­ic governance.

The event is the first iter­a­tion of Amer­i­ca’s most promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive gath­er­ing CPAC to take place in con­ti­nen­tal Europe. Sched­uled for 18–20 May 2022 in the Hun­gar­i­an cap­i­tal Budapest, it will also include speak­ing appear­ances by San­ti­a­go Abas­cal Conde, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox par­ty, and Eduar­do Bol­sonaro, a son of Brazil’s right-wing Pres­i­dent Jair Bol­sonaro. The gath­er­ing is orga­nized by the Cen­ter for Fun­da­men­tal Rights (CFR), a Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment-fund­ed orga­ni­za­tion that says its mis­sion is to pre­serve “nation­al iden­ti­ty, sov­er­eign­ty, and Chris­t­ian social tra­di­tions.” Dur­ing an April 2022 press event, CFR Pres­i­dent Mik­lós Szán­thó explained that the coop­er­a­tion with CPAC had been ongo­ing for over two years and that in 2021, he was present at the main CPAC con­fer­ence in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Dur­ing the same press event, Dan Schnei­der, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the CPAC host Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive Union, said that his orga­ni­za­tion had been work­ing towards “tak­ing CPAC on the road” and that sim­i­lar con­fer­ences have already been held in Asia and South America.

Ear­li­er this year, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) pub­lished a report on the role that promi­nent US con­ser­v­a­tives, includ­ing Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son, have been play­ing in a devel­op­ing alliance with Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US by using Hun­gary as a plat­form. In August 2021, the GIOR report­ed that Carl­son had spent a week host­ing his show from Budapest, where he gave what was described as a “fawn­ing inter­view” with Vik­tor Orbán.

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 US Hamas infra­struc­ture at that time. Doc­u­ments dis­cov­ered dur­ing 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.