By Christopher Holton and Sarah Pavlis of the Center for Security Policy
Overnight, America was greeted with the news that NPR (National Public Radio) analyst Juan Williams had been fired because he admitted on the Fox News Channel that he sometimes felt uncomfortable on an airplane when Muslim wearing traditional garb were on board.
Williams’ feelings are no doubt shared by millions of other Americans, as well as citizens of the West. After all, the vast majority of terrorist incidents in recent years have been carried out by Muslim Jihadists who invoke Islam to justify their actions. No example hits home more than the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Some observers in the West may claim that the September 11th hijackers were “radicals” or “violent extremists” who had hijacked a peaceful religion.
However, this misses the point. It doesn’t matter at all what motives we assign to our enemies. What matters are the motives that they themselves assign to their actions. In warfare, your enemy’s reality becomes your reality—or at least it better, if you want to have a chance at defeating him. As Sun Tzu said: If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
The fact is, the Jihadists go to great lengths to justify their actions based on Islamic Shariah law, the Quran and the Hadiths.
Williams didn’t say anything unusual. Many Americans feel the same way. The only difference is that Williams made his statement on national television and, in the current atmosphere of political correctness, it cost him his job.
But now we also know that this is just part of the story.
It appears that NPR came under pressure from a Muslim hate group with ties to HAMAS: the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
CAIR petitioned NPR to punish Williams for exercising his First Amendment rights under the U.S. constitution.
As it turns out, CAIR and NPR have a pretty cozy relationship, something American taxpayers should be concerned about:
NPR Compares Palin, Gingrich to Historic Anti-Semites, Sympathizes with Former CAIR Publicist
National Public Radio is strongly urging America to get over its apparently rabid case of Islamophobia. On Sunday night’s All Things Considered newscast, anchor Guy Raz played audio clips of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin opposing the Ground Zero Mosque, and then launched into how much this resembles historic anti-Semitism…
What Raz does not point out is that Rabiah Ahmed is a former publicist and prominent national spokesperson for the Council for Islamic-American Relations (CAIR), a group named as an un-indicted co-conspirator in a terrorist funding case. Raz didn’t so much conduct a news interview with Rabiah Ahmed as much as he joined her in condemning the sad and bigoted state of America today:
The fact that NPR would act at the behest of CAIR is disturbing, given what we know about CAIR.
CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) organization, the Muslim Brotherhood being the original Jihadist organization founded in 1928 in Egypt. The MB is the political wing of the global Jihadist insurgency, with groups like Al Qaeda, HAMAS, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Abu Sayyaf, and Jemmah Islamiyah being the military wing of that insurgency.
To make an analogy, Al Qaeda is the equivalent of the Waffen SS and the Muslim Brotherhood is the equivalent of the Nazi party.
CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest successful terrorism financing prosecution in U.S. history, the U.S. versus the Holy Land Foundation.
CAIR was co-founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad, both of whom were working for the now-defunct Islamic Association for Palestine, which was the Jihadist terrorist group HAMAS’ American affiliate.
Ahmad is infamous for this quote in a 1998 interview:
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
CAIR opened its first office with seed money provided by the Holy Land Foundation, the same Muslim charity later shut down for terrorism financing activity.
CAIR is often associated with its spokesman, a guy named Ibrahim Hooper, who once uttered this gem:
“I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.”
Outrageous quotes from people associated with CAIR are not at all unusual in fact. One of CAIR’s board members, Ihsan Bagby, once said:
“Muslims can never be full citizens of this country because there is no way we can be fully committed to the institutions and ideologies of this country.”
But people affiliated with CAIR have done far worse than just say outrageous things. The excellent web resource Discover the Networks has documented some of the activities of CAIR’s personnel:
• In September 2003, CAIR’s former Community Affairs Director, Bassem Khafagi, pled guilty to three federal counts of bank and visa fraud and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Federal investigators said that a group Khafagi founded, the Islamic Assembly of North America, had funneled money to activities supporting terrorism and had published material advocating suicide attacks against the United States. Khafagi’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.
• In July 2004, Ghassan Elashi, a founding Board member of CAIR’s Texas chapter, was convicted along with his four brothers of having illegally shipped computers from their Dallas-area business, InfoCom Corporation, to Libya and Syria, two designated state sponsors of terrorism. That same month, Elashi was charged with having provided more than $12.4 million to Hamas while he was running the Holy Land Foundation. In April 2005, Elashi and two of his brothers were also convicted of knowingly doing business with Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook, who was Elashi’s brother-in-law. Elashi’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR, whose Dallas-Fort Worth chapter depicted the Elashis’ indictment as “a war on Islam and Muslims.”
• FBI wiretap evidence which was introduced during the 2007 trial of the Holy Land Foundation (a trial that explored and proved HLF’s financial ties to Hamas), proved that CAIR co-founder and CEO Nihad Awad had attended a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and operatives who collaborated on a plan to disguise funding for Hamas as charitable donations.
• Randall Todd Royer, who served as a communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR, trained with Lashkar-I-Taiba, an al Qaeda-tied Kashmir organization that is listed on the State Department’s international terror list. He was also indicted on charges of conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American troops in Afghanistan. He later pled guilty to lesser firearm-related charges and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Royer’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.
• Onetime CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad was arrested on terrorism-related charges and was deported from the United States due to his subsequent work as Executive Director of the Global Relief Foundation, which in October 2002 was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for financing al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
• Abdurahman Alamoudi, one of CAIR’s former directors, is a supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, and is currently serving a 23-year prison sentence for terrorism-related convictions.
Despite all of this baggage, CAIR was able to influence NPR, a quasi-government agency supported by taxpayer dollars, to end the employment of someone who only said something that CAIR did not like – and not even on NPR’s air.
Denial of free speech is a common tactic of the Muslim Brotherhood based in Shariah law.
Shariah law does not provide for nor protect free speech. Criticism of Islam, Allah or Mohammed is a criminal offense. When Muslims attempt to suppress free speech critiques of Islam they are abiding by shariah law, and insisting that we non-Muslims bow before shariah law as well. NPR has fallen into line obediently in this case.
Given some other information that we know about NPR, this should come as no surprise.
One of the producers of NPR’s morning show is a woman named Asma Khalid. In 2009, Khalid served on a panel of journalists for ISNA (Islamic Society of North America).
For a journalist with a taxpayer-supported entity such as NPR to be cozy with ISNA is worrisome indeed.
ISNA is a Muslim Brotherhood organization and, like CAIR, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial. ISNA was co-founded by Sami Al-Arian, the U.S. leader for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was convicted on terrorism charges and sentenced to 57 months in prison, after which he will be deported. ISNA is largely funded by Saudi Wahhabi money. Through its subsidiary, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), ISNA holds the mortgages of between 27% and 80% of the mosques in the USA.
One of the mosques that ISNA owned was the Islamic Society of Boston, which was founded by someone we already mentioned above, Abdurahman Alamoudi. Alamoudi, who was also a Director of CAIR, was the Washington DC regional representative for ISNA.
Today, Alamoudi is serving a 23 year sentence in federal prison after being convicted on terrorism charges.
Finally, this is not the first time that NPR has done CAIR’s bidding.
In the September 26th 2001, article entitled “Despite Terror Attacks, NPR maintains blacklist of Leading Terror expert” written by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) they state that Steven Emerson, expert on terrorism and Islamic extremism is that since 1998 publicly funded National Public Radio has blacklisted Mr. Emerson. Ironically enough, NPR’s ban came to light just after US cruise missile strikes against Osama bin Laden’s organization, which had been implicated in suicide bomb attacks on US embassies in Africa.
Covering the strike, NPR’s Talk of the Nation program on August 20, 1998 briefly interviewed Emerson, spurring an immediate and furious reaction from CAIR and its followers. One of those followers, Chicago-based activist Ali Abunimah, had, after a previous Emerson appearance on NPR, received assurances that Mr. Emerson would be banned from the network.
As NPR’s Michael Fields put it, Emerson’s appearance had been a “mistake” and “it won’t happen again.”
When, on August 20 Emerson did again appear, Abunimah e-mailed NPR producer Ellen Silva, stating that he was:
“shocked and disappointed that TOTN had Steven Emerson on its call in show today as a guest. Mr. Emerson is a well-documented anti-Arab, anti-Muslim racist. … Last time, I accepted the explanation that it had been an innocent error. But how many errors can be innocent? This is a very serious matter and will require an appropriate response…. We will be listening very carefully, and pursuing this matter further. Ali Abunimah.”
The next day Ms. Silva sent the following servile reply:
“thank you for your letter. our executive producer was in charge of that decision…not me… i take your point and extend an apology to you from the staff of totn. please take care, -ellen”
When Abunimah objected that an apology was not enough, NPR’s Silva did not disappoint the pro-Arab activist, assuring him:
“… you have my promise he [Emerson] won’t be used again. it is npr policy.”
After this correspondence came to light, senior NPR official Jeffrey Dvorkin (now the network’s ombudsman) insisted that Silva misspoke, and that:
“… there never was and never will be a policy of banning or blacklisting at NPR… Mr. Emerson is not “banned”, and in fact we anticipate that he will be on NPR again at an appropriate time.”
The “appropriate time” apparently has yet to arrive, for, even now, after Emerson’s warnings have come true, and we have seen thousands of Americans killed by Islamic-extremists, NPR’s defacto blacklist is still in effect. In the last few days Emerson has been interviewed by CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and many other media outlets, but not NPR, depriving the publicly-funded network’s listeners of his unique insights into the grave problems that our nation must now confront.
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