by Sperry, Paul
But CAIR knows full well that Arab Muslims believe they are descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael, while Jews and Christians believe they descended from Isaac—Abraham’s other son, who was favored by God in the story of the Bible.
Muslims also believe their deity told Abraham to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac, as a test of his faith. They even celebrate Abraham’s obedience—and Ishmael’s willingness to be sacrificed for the sake of Allah—each year by sacrificing livestock on Eid al-Adha. (In fact, the throats of hundreds of goats are slit in Muslim enclaves across America during their annual festival.)
This is no minor theological point. The Bible says God chose to establish his covenant with Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac, instead of Ishmael, the son of the slave girl Hagar. In fact, God banished Ishmael—described in the Bible as “a wild donkey of a man” whose “hand will be against everyone”—to the desert.
Here’s another fundamental difference: Unlike the God of the Bible, Allah does not recognize Jews as his chosen people.
WHOPPER NUMBER 2: After 9/11, CAIR cited an explosion in anti-Islamic hate crimes in demanding more outreach with the FBI and special rights and protections for Muslims. “Unlike any other past crisis,” CAIR claimed, “the post-September 11 anti-Muslim backlash has been the most violent.”
But the latest Justice Department data on hate crimes reveal CAIR has been crying wolf. Not only are anti-Islamic hate crimes way down, but they’re a fraction of overall religious hate crimes. The overwhelming majority of such crimes target Jews, something CAIR and other Muslim groups don’t seem all that concerned about.
In 2007, a whopping 69 percent of religiously motivated attacks were on Jews, while just 8 percent targeted Muslims—even though the Jewish and Muslim populations are comparable in size. Catholics and Protestants, who together account for almost 9 percent of victims, are subject to as much abuse as Muslims in this country.
In the most recent year, anti-Islamic hate crimes totaled 115. While just one hate crime is one too many, that’s a 26 percent drop from 2006 and a 76 percent plunge from 2001. And the number is minuscule compared with the 969 offenses against Jews. For every attack on a Muslim in this country, there are nine against a Jew.55
The government data give lie to CAIR’s alarmist narrative of “Islamophobic” lynch mobs marching on mosques across America. In reality, Americans have been remarkably tolerant and respectful of Muslims and their institutions since 9/11.
It’s plain that CAIR, true to form, has been exaggerating the numbers and hyping tensions to advance its political agenda. Every year the pressure group releases a report citing thousands of alleged civil rights and physical abuses against Muslims, which largely are based on anecdotal reporting from members. Despite CAIR’s obvious bias (and proven record of dissembling), the PC-drunk media report its numbers unfiltered and without question.
But if you peel them back, you find that many of them are victimless crimes. For instance:
In its 2008 report (covering 2007 cases of alleged abuses), CAIR included as a “hate crime” remarks made by Cincinnati talk-radio host Bill “Willie” Cunningham. “The great war of this generation’s time is the war against Islamic fascists,” he said on air. And referring to suicide bombers, he remarked, “They do not live for life, they live for death.” Apparently CAIR thinks Cunningham should be arrested for exercising his First Amendment rights.
In its 2007 report, CAIR listed as a “hate crime” the following example: “A copy of the Quran was found in a toilet at the library of Pace University in New York.” There were other atrocities, too, such as someone trampling on a “flower bed” at a mosque in Texas.56
These are all inconvenient facts for CAIR and its antiwar agenda. It can’t roll back the USA Patriot Act and key counterterror measures—such as mosque surveillance and passenger profiling—without ginning up sympathy in Washington for Muslims as a persecuted minority. Each time CAIR releases another over-hyped hate crimes report, it argues that violence and harassment against Muslims have multiplied because of the U.S. war on terror.
“Government acts”—including airport searches, detentions, and interrogations—“send a green light to mistreat Muslims,” claims CAIR chief Awad.
With its 2008 report, CAIR recommends the enactment of “legislation banning racial, religious, or ethnic profiling.”
But by crying wolf, CAIR shows it cares more about furthering its own political agenda than protecting ordinary Muslims. When real abuses occur, few Americans may pay attention. So CAIR is actually doing the Muslim community it claims to represent a disservice by exaggerating such crimes.
WHOPPER NUMBER 1: No official numbers exist for the size of the Muslim population in America, yet CAIR advises journalists that “six to seven million is the most commonly cited figure” and a safe number to use in stories.
What it doesn’t say is that figure was made up by CAIR, and that it’s been the one “commonly” citing it for years in press releases, alongside the claim that “Islam is one of the fastest-growing religions in America.”
Obama parroted the bogus number in his speech to world Muslims in Cairo when he said there are “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.”
This is CAIR’s biggest, most pernicious fabrication of all, because it uses its mythical seven-million Muslim voting bloc to sway credulous politicians. They believe the figure, and CAIR uses it as a cudgel to help advance its subversive Islamist agenda.
The Pew Research Center recently put the lie to CAIR’s claim, however. In an exhaustive scientific study of the size of the U.S. Muslim population, it was able to identify only 2.35 million Muslims—less than half the number commonly cited by CAIR, and less than 1 percent of the U.S. population of 305 million.
Pew, a liberal group with certainly no interest in marginalizing Islam, described its study as “perhaps the most rigorous effort to date to scientifically estimate the size of the Muslim American population.”
Yet it practically apologized for its more accurate reading, being that it came in “significantly below some commonly reported estimates frequently cited by Muslim groups” like CAIR.
The report received little attention, however. And most media outlets—as well as Congress, the White House, and the State Department—continue to parrot CAIR’s original figure to describe the size of the nation’s Muslim population.
Only it’s a wildly inflated estimate manufactured by CAIR, something that the media could easily refute if they dared—simply by deconstructing CAIR’s unscientific methodology.
While the number of Muslims is growing thanks to higher birth rates and immigration, it’s nowhere near CAIR’s claim. Even the most generous independent estimate puts it at nearly half that size, or four million.
Finding reliable data for Muslims in America is hard because the Census Bureau does not survey creed. So CAIR, which has an agenda to Islamize America, gladly filled the vacuum.
To come up with its own figure, it hired a “respected scholar” by the name of Ihsan Bagby to lead its “study.” But Bagby’s not a trained demographer; and as a longtime CAIR board member, he’s not even independent.
Worse, he admits the number he arrived at is a “guesstimation.” Here’s how he came up with it:
1. With help from CAIR researchers, Bagby called the nation’s 1,209 mosques and interviewed 416 of them, asking them how many people were involved in their mosque in any way. The average response was 1,625, which is probably high, given that two imams claimed fifty thousand when the nation’s largest mosque—Dar al-Hijrah in the DC suburbs—has only about three thousand.
2. Bagby then multiplied that fuzzy participation figure by the 1,209 mosques and came up with two million “mosqued Muslims.”
3. Next, he multiplied that sum by a magical factor of three to capture Muslims who might not participate in mosque activities, and arrived at the original six million guesstimate for the size of the Muslim population in America.57
4.
He says his factor of three was an educated guess. More like a wild exaggeration. Or perhaps a political calculation, as it produced a number that conveniently matched the size—and potential political clout—of the Jewish population in the country, also estimated at six million.
5. CAIR then took the liberty of bumping up the Muslim count to seven million. Now—presto—it’s at seven million, and climbing, according to new figures bandied about by Muslim activists.
6. But it’s the Wahhabi lobby’s big lie. CAIR and other militant Muslim groups use it to intimidate politicians, corporations, and media to change policy.
Eight-million-strong Muslims make the threat of bloc voting and boycotts a lot scarier. And the bigger the number, the bigger the foothold Islamists gain in American society.
But don’t buy it. It’s a total exaggeration—like most of the claims churned out by CAIR’s propaganda machine.
THE GOEBBELS OF THE ISLAMIST MOVEMENT
All this false propaganda is peddled by CAIR’s chief spokesman through press releases and email “action alerts.” Hooper issued misleading press releases regarding the Days fraud scandal, as well, which led Muslim plaintiffs to add his name to the list of defendants in the case.
Known as “the Goebbels of the Islamist movement,” Hooper has held workshops to help fellow propagandists “manipulate” (his word) the media into writing favorably of Islam, glossing over all its warts.
He teaches his pack of attack dogs to smear critics and shift the debate away from the truth of their message. “The credibility of the message depends on the credibility of the messenger,” he is fond of saying. So kill the messenger, kill the message.
Hooper thinks journalists are lazy and last year gave a PowerPoint presentation to CAIR staffers on how to spoonfeed them information.58 He monitors the media “gatekeepers” during luncheons and breakfasts and other outreach events, and brags that he seduces them into contacting his office for quotes through his incendiary “action alerts.”
While MSNBC, NPR, CBS, and CNN serve as CAIR’s useful idiots, Hooper warns the faithful to avoid doing interviews with:
The Washington Times, New York Post, New York Sun and other “propaganda papers;”
“Right-Wing Internet” news sites;
Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor and Glenn Beck and other “conservative cable” TV shows; and
Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and other “conservative radio” hosts.59
That’s because they, unlike his useful idiots, don’t respect his wishes to sanitize reports about Palestinian and other Islamic terrorists by calling them “militants” or “rebels,” or even “victims” of Israeli “occupation.”
Hooper praises MSNBC, for one, for not using “the word ‘terrorist’ to describe every Palestinian who opposes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” Reuters, he notes, also adopts more “neutral” terminology. He commends the wire service for not using the terms “Islamic terrorist” or “Muslim extremist”—or even “Islamist,” which he also considers “pejorative.” Stories by these friendly media outlets also carry his and other CAIR officials’ quotes unquestioned, with no qualifiers regarding the source, shamelessly serving as megaphones for CAIR.
In addition to insisting journalists censor their stories and sacrifice accuracy for tolerance, Hooper recommends female reporters cover themselves before conducting interviews in mosques out of respect for the men there. He advises they show only their hands and face.60
CAIR acknowledges privately that Islam suffers from a negative image due to its treatment of women, as well as its promotion of violence. They are the “two major roadblocks” to mainstreaming Islam in America, CAIR confides in its internal training materials. Instead of disavowing them, however, CAIR advises its foot soldiers to find better ways to whitewash over them, while targeting their message at younger audiences, as they “are easier to sway.”61
Some interns nonetheless expressed doubts last year about CAIR and its real agenda after they were exposed to critical Web sites like Anti-CAIR.com, which CAIR tried to shut down in a failed lawsuit. But Hooper would just tell them it was all Islamophobic “crap,” whisteblower intern Chris Gaubatz says.
Image is everything to CAIR. Hooper never fails to trumpet the press it gets. “CAIR officials are regularly interviewed by national, local, and international media,” he says triumphantly. “CAIR officials have been cited over eleven thousand times in major national and local media.” He also boasts that CAIR’s work is now the subject of several “positive documentaries around the world.”
Hooper is particularly proud of his personal appearances on CNN and C-Span and other networks. He’s adorned the walls of CAIR’s second-floor marble lobby in Washington with giant framed video stills of him and Awad during their major TV interviews. They are the media stars of CAIR, and the main entrance to its headquarters is their Hall of Fame.
“NOTE TO BROTHERS: Do not be afraid of makeup,” media expert Hooper coaches amateur Muslim propagandists. “It is a part of the technical aspects of television.”62
The more press CAIR attracts, the more powerful it looks. And the more power it projects, the more the money pours in from big Mideast donors.
“CAIR is receiving support by some big donors not because of perceived effectiveness but because of its image in [the] media,” CAIR’s research director Mohamed Nimer observed in handwritten notes he made during one meeting. “Now people think we are this big group moving and shaking in DC.”63
CAIR’s bark is clearly bigger than its bite, as the next chapter makes abundantly clear. But subterfuge and propaganda have made up for shortfalls so far, and Hooper has been instrumental in that department.
SOFTER FACE OF CAIR
These days, however, CAIR’s high-profile spokesman is taking a lower profile. The pugnacious, six-foot, two hundred-pound Hooper has been nudged aside as the board tries to put a kinder, gentler face on its spin machine.
Besieged by negative publicity and plunging membership, directors have moved to soften CAIR’s image by putting more women out front—albeit in head scarves—as the public face of CAIR. Rabiah Ahmed and Amina Rubin are among the female Muslim flacks at CAIR who have gotten more face time in the media.
Hooper, 53, also became a lightening rod for controversy when un-American comments he made years ago resurfaced in the national press. He let it slip to a Minnesota reporter last decade that he wants Islam to rule America. Hooper failed to adequately disavow his subversive dream in recent radio interviews, which only reignited the debate over his loyalties.
Then he gave a particularly embarrassing performance on MSNBC during the so-called Flying Imams controversy. Host Tucker Carlson got the best of Hooper during an interview about the case, and Hooper imploded, and he’s still stewing about it, insiders say.
Carlson, who’s now high on CAIR’s media enemies “hit” list, asked Hooper why CAIR was suing John Doe passengers for reporting suspicious behavior aboard a US Airways flight, when such legal action could scare other Americans into silence in the face of a terrorist threat.
CARLSON: Why are you supporting a lawsuit that would punish people for doing just that?
HOOPER: Because we’re not in support of malicious reporting.
CARLSON: How do you know it was malicious?
HOOPER: Well, that’s to be determined.
CARLSON: But you are supporting these people being sued. Their lives are disrupted.
HOOPER: That’s how you…
CARLSON: You are punishing them, and yet you don’t know it was malicious what they did?64
Flustered and visibly agitated, Hooper could only raise his voice and talk over the host, which he did for the rest of the interview before closing with a snarky remark suggesting Carlson was an anti-Muslim bigot.
Even ISNA considers Hooper radioactive. He was not invited to speak at the front group’s convention last year, and he openly complained about it to colleagues during the event, recorded conve
rsations reveal. (He was also caught on tape at the time calling decorated war hero Senator John McCain “an old geezer with cancer.”)65
Behind the scenes, though, Hooper is busy launching an aggressive new propaganda campaign to depict CAIR as a civil-rights champion in league with the NAACP. CAIR is strengthening its alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus and has elected a black Muslim convert as its chairman in an effort to conflate the African-American struggle with the Muslim experience in America.
Newly elected CAIR chairman Shaw, a longtime North Carolina state senator and vice chairman of that state’s legislative black caucus, has likened the U.S. government’s co-conspirator charge against CAIR to the FBI’s surveillance of civil rights leaders in the 1960s.
“We look forward to partnering with the Obama administration to help defend civil liberties,” he says.66
Career FBI case agents say CAIR is doubling down on what has worked in the past. For over a decade, it’s managed to hide its true agenda of supporting violent jihad and militant Islam under the cover of civil-rights advocacy.
“I don’t care how many times they tell you they’re a civil rights organization, they’re not,” says a senior FBI agent in Washington. “They’re a front group for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”67
Of course, if CAIR openly confessed its true mission, it wouldn’t get a toe in the door of official Washington.
The nature of CAIR’s very existence is a lie. And it doesn’t just wildly exaggerate the size and influence of the American Muslim population it claims to represent. It also wildly exaggerates its own size and influence, as we reveal in the next chapter with data from its own records.
CHAPTER NINE
PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN ON CAIR
“CAIR is very concerned about its reputation in the community. Without the community (and Allah’s help) CAIR would fail.”
