The media isn’t going to tell you this. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “America’s largest Muslim civil liberties organization.”
In that guise, and as it has championed numerous far-left causes, it has become a respected member of the leftist establishment, with numerous ignorant and self-serving politicians lavishing praise on this unsavory gang in hopes of gaining Muslim votes.
Among them has been, not surprisingly, Kamala Harris.
This has been known for years, but no one has cared. Back in Oct. 2020, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “as California’s attorney general and then as U.S. senator, Harris forged a relationship with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the nation’s top anti-Israel groups and advocates for boycotts of the Jewish state.”
After the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, this matters more than ever.
CAIR, the Free Beacon added, “advised Harris on community issues during her time in California politics, and she later offered the group her ‘gratitude and admiration’ in a 2018 personal letter to the group.” Specifically, “Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR’s Los Angeles office, praised Harris in 2015 for including the group in an interfaith meeting with law enforcement officials. Harris, he said, ‘exemplified leadership’ by vowing to tackle Islamophobia at a time when the state’s Jewish institutions were facing threats.”
That was bad enough, since “Islamophobia” is a propaganda weapon designed to intimidate people that it is wrong — somehow “bigoted” — to oppose jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women. Even worse, long before he praised Kamala Harris, Hussam Ayloush has repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. In 2017, with Donald Trump in the White House, Ayloush called for the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Yet the following year, Harris wrote to CAIR: “Please accept my gratitude and admiration for your tireless work to promote peace, justice, and mutual understanding,”
Even that was not all. “As California’s top cop,” the Free Beacon noted, “Harris partnered with local CAIR officials and relied on them to advise her about community matters.
In 2015, for instance, Harris hosted CAIR for an interfaith community event following a deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In 2016, as Harris ran for the Senate, CAIR’s political action committee donated $1,750 to boost her campaign.”
That may not be much in the larger scheme of things, but imagine the outcry if Donald Trump had taken a small fraction of that amount from a group linked to the Ku Klux Klan.