CAIR's questionable response to Osama Bin Laden
Disinformation: CAIR has not condemned Osama bin Laden
Fact: Our condemnations can be easily found on www.cair.com.
Fact: CAIR has said Bin Laden was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and condemned al-Qaeda
In a December 13, 2001 release titled “CAIR: Video Shows Bin Laden's Complicity in 9-11 Attacks,” CAIR stated: “For anyone who was not convinced of Osama bin Laden's complicity in the events of September 11, the content of this videotape should remove all doubt.“
In a September 11, 2006 release titled “CAIR: U.S. Muslims Repudiate Al-Qaeda Rhetoric, Worldview,” CAIR stated: "As Muslims, we will continue to condemn Al-Qaeda and ensure that the rest of the world learns the true message of Islam and its teachings of peace, justice and compassion for all" and "In light of the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we feel the need to once again condemn and repudiate Al-Qaeda and its myopic worldview.”
Does this reflect CAIR’s actual view on Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda? The above statement is a clear condemnation. However, as we will see, other responses by CAIR to the attacks and its perpetrators raise questions about its motivations in making the above statements, and also helps call into question its role as a representative of American Muslims.
It helps to begin this discussion with some background on what was understood about Osama bin Laden in the public sphere, before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Osama bin Laden’s Views
Osama bin Laden’s views were public knowledge long before 2001. In December 1998, John Miller of ABC conducted an interview with him, in which he stated, with regards to developing chemical and nuclear weapons, “If I seek to acquire such weapons, this is a religious duty. How we use them is up to us.“
This was not the first time bin Laden had made threatening statements; earlier examples abound.
November 1996: The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient than the US soldier. I took up arms against the Soviets in Afghanistan for 10 years, and we believe that our battle with the United States is easy compared with the battles in which we engaged in Afghanistan.
November 1996: It is the duty of the nation as a whole to use its money in the jihad so that God's religion will prevail... With regard to the matters in which spearheads [meaning weapons] need to be used, it is a just right… The jihad is part of our Shari'ah and the nation cannot dispense with it [in its fight] against its enemies.
February 1997: Moreover, I emphasize that this war will not only be between the two people of the sacred mosques and the Americans, but it will be between the Islamic world and the Americans and their allies… if someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting his energy on other matters.
March 1997: We have declared jihad against the US, because in our religion it is our duty to make jihad so that God's word is the one exalted to the heights.
March 1997: We look upon those heroes, those men who undertook to kill the American occupiers in Riyadh and Khobar (Dhahran). We describe those as heroes and describe them as men.
March 1997: [On the 1993 jihad in Somalia against America] One day our men shot down an American helicopter. The pilot got out. We caught him, tied his legs and dragged him through the streets.
March 1997: If Russia can be destroyed, the United States can also be beheaded.
February 1998: We--with God's help--call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.
In June 1998, the State Department published a statement making it clear that they viewed bin Laden as a terrorist financier who threatened the United States. Bin Laden, himself, expressed the American view in a 1997 interview with Hamid Mir, where he said that “The United States considers me the most dangerous threat.” British journalist Robert Fisk echoed this sentiment in a 1997 article, in which he suggested to bin Laden that “the United States regarded him as the foremost "terrorist" in the world.”
CAIR’s Response to Osama bin Laden
What this amounts to is that, by the late 90s, Osama bin Laden was publicly acknowledged as a dangerous risk to Americans around the world. His face was probably not recognizable to most Americans, however the threat he posed was no less salient for this. He was a man who had, in effect, declared himself to be an enemy of the United States, and who was prepared to pursue any means available to “behead” America in his struggle for Islamist supremacy.
No doubt, most American Muslims at the time would have had no problems condemning bin Laden unequivocally, had they seen his name suggested in conjunction with terrorism or terrorist activities on American soil. CAIR’s position was different.
In 1998, a Los Angeles television station, KCOP TV, put up billboards in the region featuring a picture of bin Laden and the headline, “the sworn enemy.” Instead of acknowledging the accuracy of the billboard’s statement, CAIR protested, and charged the station with promoting Islamophobia; thus directing attention away from the threat being addressed.
"By placing an unidentified stereotypical picture of a Muslim with a beard and a turban, KCOP's billboard is implying that all men who look like him are like him, sworn enemies," said CAIR Southern California Executive Director Hussam Ayloush. "It is not right for advertisers to be sensational at the expense of reinforcing negative stereotypes of Muslims," said Ayloush.
Ibrahim Hooper
Jake Tapper, of Salon.com, wrote about Ibrahim Hooper, the communications director of CAIR, in the weeks following the second world trade center bombing. Hooper’s response on this issue was troubling. According to Tapper
Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of CAIR, refuses to outright condemn Osama bin Laden. "We condemn terrorism, we condemn the attack on the buildings," Hooper said. But why not condemn bin Laden by name, especially after President Bush has now stated that he was clearly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks?
"If Osama bin Laden was behind it, we condemn him by name," Hooper said. But why the "if" -- why qualify the response? Hooper said he resented the question. And what about prior acts of terror linked to bin Laden? Or that bin Laden has urged Muslims to kill Americans?
Again, Hooper demurred, saying only that he condemns acts of terror.
In Tapper’s October 2001 response to Hooper’s criticism of the above piece, he noted
Hooper claims I somehow have twisted his words over his inability to offer an unqualified condemnation of Osama bin Laden. He does so by -- again -- refusing to offer an unqualified condemnation of bin Laden… Surely most American Muslims would have no problem condemning bin Laden with no qualifications. Why can't Hooper?
In 2007, Hooper was again asked about Osama bin Laden; this time, in relation to a Pew Center Poll that showed a significant percentage of Muslims in Arab had favorable views of bin Laden. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson asked Hooper about the figures. Rather than acknowledging, and standing against, a dangerous perspective which was prevalent around the world, Hooper attempted to justify the results.
Carlson:…the Pugh Center, which does polling around the world, asked Muslim populations around the world, how do you feel about Osama bin Laden? And in the Islamic world, huge and disturbing percentages of the population had confidence in him…
Hooper: I don‘t think that‘s a reflection of support for the view point of Osama bin Laden, I think that‘s more a rejection of American interventionism, and you know, just saying that we don‘t like the way that things are right now…
…
Carlson: Look, if you went and asked a cross section of Americans, do you support Adolph Hitler, and 40 percent said yes ...you wouldn‘t say, well that‘s because they‘re dissatisfied with the policies of the United States government. You would say there‘s something wrong with these people [who hold these views].
Conspiracy Theories
The Investigative Project on Terrorism raises the issue of conspiracy theories forwarded by CAIR in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks.
CAIR-New York Executive Director Ghazi Khankan launched a propaganda campaign casting the attacks as part of a conspiracy to discredit Muslims. It would continue for weeks.
Khankan repeated himself at a CAIR fundraiser in Vienna, Va […] asking “Why is it assumed that Muslims were behind the attack on Sept. 11? …We know for sure at least three (unintelligible) whose names appear as part of the nineteen hijackers, who, in my opinion, have hijacked Islam. These people are still alive in the Middle East. The question is, who is impersonating these Muslim names? Who benefits from assuming that Muslims are behind this tragedy, and who benefits from this tragedy?”
At no point did CAIR publicly rebuke Khankan or disassociate itself from his statements.
[…]
CAIR tolerated continued 9/11 revisionism at a “Know Your Rights” workshop it sponsored in San Diego two months later. Invited speaker and civil rights lawyer Randall Hamud said he understood an audience member’s comment that “enemies of Islam are successful at… putting Muslims on the defensive. There’s still no evidence that Muslims carried out 9-11.”
CAIR’s views were hardly representative of most Americans’ views in September of 2001. While recent polls show a large number of Americans accept conspiracy theories about the attacks, the figure is still, according to at least one 2006 poll, a minority, and can be assumed to have been much smaller at the time of attacks.
Like many other instances over the past few years, CAIR’s concern seems to have been to divert attention away from the threat of Islamist terror by raising the specter of Islamophobia, rather than acknowledge the threat. This was a threat whose immediacy was bolstered by years of prior statements from bin Laden, whom CAIR never condemned outright until after the appearance of videos in which al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, which made an equivocal stance all but untenable.
Praise for a "Martyr"
In light of the above, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP)—a defunct organization which was closely associated with several CAIR figures, including three of its founders—published a magazine which prominently featured Abdullah Azzam. (Ibrahim Hooper, mentioned above, also worked for the IAP at one time.) Azzam was one of the leaders of the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Azzam was also a key mentor of Osama bin Laden, who was, according to one al-Qaeda training manual, Azzam’s faithful servant.
Azzam travelled frequently to the New York area where he expressed incendiary views. A New Yorker article recounts one of his visits to a local mosque.
In 1988, he told a rapt crowd of several hundred in Jersey City, ‘Blood and martyrdom are the only way to create a Muslim society... However, humanity won’t allow us to achieve this objective, because all humanity is the enemy of every Muslim.’ He then called for a revolution against ‘earthly regimes,’ and said he ‘wanted to ignite the spark that may one day burn Western interests all over the world.’
In the IAP magazine mentioned above, which was printed following Azzam’s assassination, the cover is filled with a photograph of him. The caption underneath: “Good-bye, Oh Martyr.”
Lest anyone mistake this caption for sarcasm: In an article which appears elsewhere in the magazine, Azzam is repeatedly referred to by the IAP as “our beloved sheikh,” as in the following example: “…this pure blood will water the blessed tree of jihad so that it bears thousands upon thousands of martyrs and heroes who will follow our beloved sheikh so that the march of Islamic Jihad continues…”
To our knowledge, the IAP never issued a retraction, nor has any CAIR figure involved with the IAP ever publicly explained this.
Closing
In the Salon.com article cited earlier, Sheik Muhammed Hisham Kabbani, of the Islamic Supreme Council, discussed the problem of what he said were representatives of the Muslim community who held extremist views.
"There are many Muslim organizations that claim to speak on behalf of the Muslim community but that in reality are not moderate, but extremist," Kabbani said. While Kabbani made no direct references to any group in his speech, it is with AMC and CAIR that he has publicly feuded.
Muslim extremism is dangerous, Kabbani cautioned, and the media needs to learn the difference between Islam and extremism. "What I am seeing, unfortunately, are those that are advising the media, or advising the government are not the moderate Muslims," Kabbani said. "Those whose opinion the government asks are the extremists themselves."
Why did CAIR ultimately condemn AQ? And why did it take so long? There may be no conclusive answers to this. But the ramifications of the debate are critical. Can their current stated position be trusted as an honest reflection of their ideals? Or has it been made for purposes of expediency, while they pursue an allegedly pro-Islamist agenda?
