Investigators suspect the funds were intended for Palestinian terrorists via a U.S. terror front called WISE, which at the time employed an official who personally delivered a satellite phone battery to Osama bin Laden. The same official also worked for Jaghlit’s group.
In addition, Jaghlit donated a total of $37,200 to the Holy Land Foundation, which prosecutors recently convicted as a Hamas front. Jaghlit subsequently was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror case.15
ABDURAHMAN ALAMOUDI
Another CAIR director,16 he is serving twenty-three years in federal prison for plotting terrorism. Alamoudi, who was caught on tape complaining bin Laden hadn’t killed enough Americans in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, was one of al-Qaida’s top fundraisers in America, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
NIHAD AWAD
For the first time, wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case puts CAIR’s current national executive director at a Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and activists that was secretly recorded by the FBI. Participants hatched a plot to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists as charity.
During the October 1993 meeting, according to FBI wire transcripts, Awad gave a report and was recorded discussing the pro-Hamas propaganda effort. He mentions Ghassan Dahduli, whom he worked with at the time at the Islamic Association for Palestine, another Hamas front controlled by the terror group. Both were IAP officers. Dahduli’s name also was listed in the address book of bin Laden’s personal secretary, Wadi al-Hage, serving a life sentence for his role in the U.S. embassy bombings. Dahduli, an ethnic Palestinian like Awad, was deported to Jordan after 9/11 for refusing to cooperate in the terror investigation. He recently was added to the government’s blacklist of Hamas co-conspirators.17
Awad’s and Dahduli’s phone numbers are listed in a 1993 Muslim Brotherhood document seized by federal investigators revealing “important phone numbers” for the “Palestine Section” of the Brotherhood in America.18 The court exhibit shows fugitive Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook listed on the same page with Awad, along with CAIR national board director Nabil Sadoun, who with Marzook co-founded another Hamas front detailed below. Not surprisingly, Marzook has enjoyed the undying public support of CAIR since the U.S. designated him a terrorist and deported him.
The 48-year-old Awad—who uses the alias Nehad Hammad—once publicly praised Hamas. “I am in support of the Hamas movement,” he declared the year CAIR was founded. Known by law enforcement as “Jihad” Awad, he has turned down congressional invitations to answer questions under oath. He remains under FBI scrutiny.
“He’s a bad guy—one of Hamas’s senior [supporters] in the United States,” says a veteran special agent with the FBI’s Washington field office.19
OMAR M. AHMAD
U.S. prosecutors also named CAIR’s founder and former chairman as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.20 Ahmad too was placed at the 1993 Philly meeting, FBI special agent Lara Burns testified at the trial. In fact, wiretaps and other evidence show Ahmad arranged and led the secret Hamas meetings.21 Federal prosecutors also designated him as a top leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Palestine Committee” in America, whose “designed purpose was to support Hamas,” prosecutors say. He remains under active investigation.
Ahmad, like his CAIR partner Awad, is a Palestinian refugee who also uses an alias, Omar Yehia.
Though both Ahmad and Awad were senior leaders of IAP, the Hamas front, neither of their biographical sketches posted on CAIR’s Web site mentions their IAP past.
CAIR’s founder Ahmad, while claiming to be a moderate and patriotic American, has praised suicide bombers who “kill themselves for Islam.”22 He also hosted blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman at his home not long before he was arrested and convicted of terrorism, according to Ahmad’s apartment manager at the time, who turned photographs and other evidence over to the FBI’s San Jose, California, field office.
The Blind Sheik, as he’s known, is serving a life sentence for his role in the early 1990s plot to blow up New York City tunnels, the United Nations, and other New York landmarks. He is a close ally of Osama bin Laden.
While the Blind Sheik was plotting terrorism in New York, he paid Ahmad a visit at his Villa Monroe apartment some three thousand miles away in Santa Clara, California, says then-apartment manager Andy Hyslop, who now works for the state of California. He says he witnessed a phalanx of bodyguards in green fatigue jackets escorting the Blind Sheik up the stairs to Ahmad’s second-floor corner unit.
“Omar came out on the landing in traditional robe to receive him,” Hyslop recalls, “and he gave him a big hug.”23
A few years later, a Santa Clara mosque, which Ahmad helped found, hosted and raised thousands of dollars for bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second most wanted terrorist in the world. Al-Zawahiri was a follower of the Blind Sheik. The two met in Egypt, where they were both active in the militant Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s more, Ahmad once told a group of local Muslims that they are in America to help assert Islam’s rule over the country.
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” a local reporter quoted him as saying at the Muslim conference, adding, “The Quran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”24
Ahmad, 49, insists he was misquoted. However, an FBI wiretap transcript quotes Ahmad agreeing with terrorists gathered at a secret Philly meeting to “camouflage” their true intentions by employing “deception.”
He compared it to the head fake in basketball. “This is like one who plays basketball: He makes a player believe that he is doing this, while he does something else,” Ahmad said. “Like they say, politics is a completion of war.”25
Ahmad has taken a low profile since 2003, when his seditious statements about replacing the Constitution with the Quran were widely circulated in the press. Though he stepped down as chairman of the CAIR board in 2004, he remained intimately involved in CAIR operations, working behind the scenes. (His replacement at the helm appeared to be a cardboard cutout with little actual power. Parvez Ahmed was an unpaid volunteer who never left his job as an associate professor in Jacksonville, Florida, and resigned last year due to conflicts with the board.)
NABIL SADOUN
A current CAIR National board member, Sadoun has served on the board of the United Association for Studies and Research, a known Hamas front in America. In fact, Sadoun co-founded UASR with Hamas leader Marzook. The Justice Department added Washington-based UASR to its list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land terror case.26
MOHAMED NIMER
CAIR’s longtime research director also served as a researcher and board director for UASR, a strategic arm for Hamas in the U.S. Tellingly, CAIR neglects to mention Nimer’s or Sadoun’s roles at UASR in their bios.
RAFEEQ JABER
A founding board director and vice president of CAIR, Jaber was the longtime president of the Islamic Association for Palestine. In 2002, a federal judge found that “the Islamic Association for Palestine has acted in support of Hamas.” 27 In his capacity as IAP chief, Jaber praised Hezbollah attacks on Israel. He also served on the board of a radical Muslim Brotherhood mosque in the Chicago area.
RABIH HADDAD
A CAIR speaker who helped raise funds for the group, he was one of the founders of the Global Relief Foundation, which after 9/11 was blacklisted by the Treasury Department for financing al-Qaida and other terror groups. Its assets were frozen in December 2001. Internal memos show CAIR has coordinated fundraising efforts with Global Relief.28 Haddad, who raised money for CAIR’s Ann Arbor, Michigan chapter, was arrested on terror-related charges and deported to Lebanon in 2003.
MOHAMMAD EL-MEZAIN
The former Holy Land chairman conducted fundraising for CAIR, soliciting more than $100,000 for the group at a 2004 CAIR event in New York, for example. He was convicted earlier this year of conspiring to provide materia
l support to Hamas terrorists by a federal jury in Dallas, and is now behind bars. El-Mezain is related to Hamas leader Marzook and is close to the Muslim cleric who privately counseled some of the 9/11 hijackers.
SIRAJ WAHHAJ
A longtime member of CAIR’s board of advisors, Wahhaj was named by the Justice Department as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing investigation. The radical Brooklyn imam was close to convicted terrorist Sheik Abdel Rahman and even defended him during his trial as a character witness.
Wahhaj, a black convert himself, is converting gang members to Islam and holding “jihad camps” for them.29 With a combination of Islam and Uzis30, he says, the street thugs will be a powerful force for Islam the day America “will crumble.”31
His son also has had trouble with the law. Siraj Ibn Wahhaj in 2005 was detained by Homeland Security authorities at JFK International Airport after arriving on a Royal Air Morocco flight. Agents interrogated him for four hours on suspicion of jihadist activity.32
The elder Wahhaj remains heavily involved in CAIR business, internal documents show. In 2006, for example, CAIR National enlisted him to help raise $1 million for the organization, alongside Awad, Ahmad, and other board members.33 In fact, Wahhaj conducted the fundraising at CAIR’s annual banquet in 2008, raising $210,000 by the end of the night.34
BASSEM EL-KHAFAGI
Another CAIR official, Khafagi was arrested in 2003 while serving as CAIR’s director of community affairs. He pleaded guilty to charges of bank and visa fraud stemming from a federal counterterror probe of his leadership role in the Islamic Assembly of North America, which has supported al-Qaida and advocated suicide attacks on America. He was sentenced to ten months in prison and deported to his native Egypt.
Since his arrest, CAIR has tried to distance itself from Khafagi, arguing he was a “contractor” and not a direct employee. Financial records, however, show CAIR National treated him like a high-level employee, even purchasing computer equipment for him in 2002 so he could work with CAIR’s leadership out of its Washington headquarters.35
HAMZA YUSUF
After 9/11, the FBI investigated the imam and member of CAIR’s board of advisors because just two days before the attacks, he made an ominous prediction to a Muslim audience in California.
“This country is facing a terrible fate and the reason for that is because this country stands condemned,” Yusuf warned. “It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did. And lest people forget, Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands.”
Yusuf is also a regular keynote speaker at CAIR events. “Hamza Yusuf is a well-respected, well-known Muslim leader in this country,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said in his defense.36
GHASSAN ELASHI
A founding director of CAIR’s Texas chapter, he was convicted in 2004 of illegally shipping high-tech goods to terror state Syria, and is serving eighty months in prison. In addition to that conviction, a jury found him guilty in 2008 of providing material support to Hamas in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Elashi was chairman of the charitable front, which provided seed capital to CAIR. He also is related to Hamas leader Marzook.
CAIR has also tried to distance itself from Elashi by arguing that he did not work out of its national headquarters. “The fact that Elashi was once associated with one of our more than thirty regional chapters has no legal significance,” CAIR asserted in a prepared statement.
However, CAIR’s national office rushed to Elashi’s defense when federal agents raided his Dallas office, blasting the government’s actions as an “anti-Muslim witch hunt.” The contacts listed on the press release issued by CAIR were Hooper, Awad, and Elashi himself.37 What’s more, Elashi attended the secret Hamas meeting in Philadelphia with Awad and co-founder Ahmad.
In its defense, CAIR protests that you can’t incriminate an “entire” organization for a few bad apples (even if, in CAIR’s case, they number more than a dozen and include its acting executive director and founders).
To try to demonstrate the point, CAIR’s national legislative director last summer instructed interns to search public databases to find a Fox News employee who had been arrested and convicted of a felony. Corey Saylor wanted to show that every organization, including CAIR’s critics, has criminals who have worked for it, and that management can’t be held responsible for the activities of every employee.
“Corey wanted to use this in an interview [with the media] to show that you can’t blame an entire organization for one person’s missteps,” undercover intern Chris Gaubatz says. However, the interns were “unable to find anything.”
CHAPTER THREE
FRONTING FOR HAMAS
“From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”
—U.S. Justice Department1
DURING LAST YEAR’S Holy Land Foundation terror financing trial, FBI agent Lara Burns took the stand to go over wiretap transcripts from a secret 1993 Philadelphia meeting held by Hamas leaders in America. Federal prosecutors asked her about a passage from defendant Shukri Abu Baker, who was recorded talking about the need to form a new front organization to support their “movement,” one seemingly detached from the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Existing fronts such as Holy Land were earning a reputation as extremist—they were “marked”—and he and others gathered at the meeting envisioned an “alternative” organization that would appear less “conspicuous” to the American public, according to FBI transcripts.
Prosecutor Barry Jonas—deputy chief of the Justice Department’s terrorist financing unit—asked agent Burns whether any groups formed after the 1993 meeting fit their description. “CAIR,” she replied.2
Indeed, CAIR was created less than one year after that Philadelphia meeting.
It has taken fifteen years for all of the extremist baggage to catch up to this self-proclaimed “moderate” Muslim group. But now there is no denying its terrorist roots.
How did this new, improved Hamas terror front evolve? It’s instructive to go back to the beginning days of the Brotherhood movement in America, when Brotherhood leaders created CAIR’s parent. They called it the Islamic Association for Palestine, or IAP, and there’s no doubt it was a U.S. “front” for Palestinian jihad against Israel, because that’s the language they used to describe it in their secret manifestos.
Two well-educated, if radicalized, members of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee took over the reins of IAP not long after Hamas launched its “blessed Intifada” against Israel in the late ‘80s. Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad were born in the same Palestinian refugee camp and they burned with hatred toward Israel as well as their adopted country for supporting the Jewish nation economically and militarily.
In 1992, Hamas asked the committee for more American money to finance suicide bombing operations against Israel, complaining its “financial needs” were not being met. “Provide us with what helps us of funds and weapons,” it pleaded in one letter from the Gaza Strip. “Weapons, weapons, our brothers.”
“Jihad in Palestine is different from any jihad,” the letter continued. “The meaning of killing a Jew for the liberation of Palestine cannot be compared to any jihad on earth.”3
Ahmad dutifully stepped up support. Among other things, he brought in Hamas speakers to IAP conferences to help raise funds and joined them in exalting suicide bombers as martyrs for Islam.
Then in October 1993, Ahmad called to order a secret Hamas summit at a Courtyard by Marriott hotel in Philadelphia. There, IAP and Holy Land officials hatched a scheme to disguise payments to Hamas terrorists and their families as charity. Wiretaps also record them stating the need to deceive Americans about their true objectives while Hamas launched a campaign of terror attacks.
‘A MEDIA TWINKLE’
The IAP and Holy Land officials worried, however, that the Hamas infrastructure in America was insufficient
ly equipped to launch a convincing propaganda campaign. Missing was a media office savvy enough to seduce both the American media and the government into looking the other way as they advanced their radical agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing a Shariah theocracy at home. They needed a new front group that, in Abu Baker’s words, could give their subversive agenda “a media twinkle.”
Enter the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR is first mentioned by name in Brotherhood documents as part of the July 30, 1994, agenda of the Palestine Committee. This is the smoking gun linking CAIR directly to the Hamas network inside America. Minutes reveal the purpose of the meeting was to discuss “suggestions to develop [the] work of CAIR” and its “coordination” with the Hamas triumvirate of IAP, Holy Land (which shared its Dallas offices with IAP), and the Washington-based United Association for Studies and Research, or UASR.4 Along with IAP, UASR was co-founded by the deputy chief of Hamas’s political operations, Mousa Abu Marzook, who led the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in America before being designated a terrorist by the U.S. He is now considered a fugitive living in Syria.
He and other participants at the July 1994 committee meeting also talked about satisfying the “need for trained resources in the media and political fields” to “exert more efforts in the advancement of the Palestine Cause from the Islamic aspect.”
Fittingly, CAIR was incorporated less than two months later—on September 15, 1994.
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