My response to Corey Saylor
Reader comment on item: Emerson Exposes Radical Ties of State Department Outreach Partners

Submitted by Steven Emerson, Aug 13, 2008 15:24

Let's be specific about what was said. In my testimony, I cited an April 2006 CAIR press release titled, "CAIR REPS ATTEND RECEPTION FOR MUKHTARAN MAI," which contained the following:

"CAIR Governmental Affairs Director Corey Saylor told Hughes the (Bin Laden audio) tape (that surfaced in April of 2006) sought to exploit legitimate Muslim grievances and issues to further Bin Laden's own twisted and un-Islamic agenda."

Now Saylor argues that he was not rationalizing violent attacks, yet that is exactly what he and his organization have done for years. In the name of so-called "legitimate Muslim grievances," without defining them clearly, CAIR repeatedly has made statements of ideological support for terrorist groups and their leaders.

Saylor writes: "My assertion, which I believe to be fully in America's national security interest, is that, if our nation takes a leading role in guiding the Israelis and Palestinians to finalizing a just and lasting peace, this will deprive Al-Qaeda and other anti-American forces of a tool they use to bring people into their murderous mindset: the allegation that Americans do not care about Palestinian suffering."

That's an interesting argument from a CAIR officer. If he meant it, he would demand that his organization denounce Hamas and Hizballah and call on them to cease their terrorist campaigns that make peace even more difficult to attain.

Money to Hamas is exactly what bin Laden complained about in that April 2006 audio tape. Hamas took power in Gaza just three weeks earlier after a bloody battle with the Palestinian National Authority. The U.S. and other governments cut off funds to the Hamas government, prompting bin Laden to say ""the opposition to the Hamas government is proof of the crusade against Muslims."

Remember, CAIR was founded less than a year after Hamas members and supporters gathered in Philadelphia in 1993 to discuss ways to "derail" the Oslo Peace Accords. Transcripts from that gathering show the group, including CAIR Chairman-Emeritus Omar Ahmad and Executive Director Nihad Awad, opposed the peace deal for two reasons. Following the Hamas charter, they opposed a peaceful, two-state solution to the conflict. And they feared the Accords, by creating a Palestinian National Authority from the secular Fatah movement, would marginalize the Islamists in Hamas.

This wasn't about Palestinian suffering. It was a political power play that exploits Palestinian suffering to solicit support for the violence it uses to achieve their aims. The meeting starts with Omar Ahmad announcing that it is a meeting of the Palestine Committee. We know from internal records that the Palestine Committee was a U.S. conglomeration of Muslim Brotherhood groups assembled to benefit Hamas.

And we know from an internal Brotherhood memorandum that committee members see their existence in America as "a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions." (see page 21 of the link)

Remember that CAIR has been named an unindicted co-conspirator and a member of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Hamas fundraising trial in Dallas against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), and federal prosecutors in two separate jurisdictions have linked the organization to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.

In February, Saylor wrote to a federal judge on behalf of Fairfax County, Va. police Sgt. Weiss Rasool. Rasool admitted illegally tapping into law enforcement databases to run license tag numbers for a friend who turned out to be under FBI surveillance as part of a terrorism investigation.

But to Saylor, Rasool was someone "eager to promote a substantive relationship between the Fairfax County Police Department and the local Muslim community. His efforts played a significant role in improving trust in a time when mutual misunderstanding could easily severe (sic) all positive ties between these two groups."

Just last week, Saylor played word games rather than directly address Hamas and Hizballah terror in an interview on FOX News:

Corey Saylor: I'm telling you in a very clear fashion – CAIR condemns terrorist acts, whoever commits them, wherever they commit them, whenever they commit them.

David Lee Miller: That's not the same thing as saying you condemn Hamas and you condemn Hizballah.

Corey Saylor: Well I recognize that you don't like my answer to the question, but that's the answer to the question.

In 2007, on the topic of peace in the Middle East, Saylor said, "If America is to play a credible role in Middle East peacemaking, we must listen to representatives of all sides in the conflict, not just to those who represent the Israeli Apartheid lobby."[1]

Sure. If CAIR ever wants to play a credible role in the U.S., it needs to denounce, rather than support and apologize for, terrorist groups like Hamas, Hizballah. CAIR needs to stop receiving funding from donors from Saudi Arabia – an actual, as opposed to an imagined, Apartheid regime. While no country, especially in the Middle East, is perfect, Israel has over 1 million Arab citizens, including Muslims, Christians and Druze. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has no non-Muslim citizens, no churches or synagogues, all religions aside from Islam have been criminalized, women are not allowed to drive or leave the house without a male chaperone, and the government forbids women from even participating on its Olympic team, in gross violation of international treaties and declarations on human rights, as well as the International Olympic Committee rules themselves, which state: "Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympics Movement."

Saylor, rather than asking for a retraction and an apology, should apologize to the entire country for his work on behalf of a self-proclaimed "civil rights" and "advocacy" group that, in actuality, was founded by Hamas supporters for the express purpose of advancing the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.

[1] "CAIR: Congress Asked to Hear Both Sides of Mideast Conflict", February 12, 2007, http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20070212/pl_usnw/cair__congress_asked_to_hear_both_sides_of_mideast_conflict

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