Muslim Mafia (22 page)

“NOTE TO BROTHERS: Do not be afraid of makeup,” media expert Hooper coaches amateur Muslim propagandists. “It is a part of the technical aspects of television.”
⁶²

The more press CAIR attracts, the more powerful it looks. And the more power it projects, the more the money pours in from big Mideast donors.

“CAIR is receiving support by some big donors not because of perceived effectiveness but because of its image in [the] media,” CAIR’s research director Mohamed Nimer observed in handwritten notes he made during one meeting. “Now people think we are this big group moving and shaking in DC.”
⁶³

CAIR’s bark is clearly bigger than its bite, as the next chapter makes abundantly clear. But subterfuge and propaganda have made up for shortfalls so far, and Hooper has been instrumental in that department.

SOFTER FACE OF CAIR

These days, however, CAIR’s high-profile spokesman is taking a lower profile. The pugnacious, six-foot, two hundred-pound Hooper has been nudged aside as the board tries to put a kinder, gentler face on its spin machine.

Besieged by negative publicity and plunging membership, directors have moved to soften CAIR’s image by putting more women out front—albeit in head scarves—as the public face of CAIR. Rabiah Ahmed and Amina Rubin are among the female Muslim flacks at CAIR who have gotten more face time in the media.

Hooper, 53, also became a lightening rod for controversy when un-American comments he made years ago resurfaced in the national press. He let it slip to a Minnesota reporter last decade that he wants Islam to rule America. Hooper failed to adequately disavow his subversive dream in recent radio interviews, which only reignited the debate over his loyalties.

Then he gave a particularly embarrassing performance on MSNBC during the so-called Flying Imams controversy. Host Tucker Carlson got the best of Hooper during an interview about the case, and Hooper imploded, and he’s still stewing about it, insiders say.

Carlson, who’s now high on CAIR’s media enemies “hit” list, asked Hooper why CAIR was suing John Doe passengers for reporting suspicious behavior aboard a US Airways flight, when such legal action could scare other Americans into silence in the face of a terrorist threat.

CARLSON: Why are you supporting a lawsuit that would punish people for doing just that?

HOOPER: Because we’re not in support of malicious reporting.

CARLSON: How do you know it was malicious?

HOOPER: Well, that’s to be determined.

CARLSON: But you are supporting these people being sued. Their lives are disrupted.

HOOPER: That’s how you…

CARLSON: You are punishing them, and yet you don’t know it was malicious what they did?
⁶⁴

Flustered and visibly agitated, Hooper could only raise his voice and talk over the host, which he did for the rest of the interview before closing with a snarky remark suggesting Carlson was an anti-Muslim bigot.

Even ISNA considers Hooper radioactive. He was not invited to speak at the front group’s convention last year, and he openly complained about it to colleagues during the event, recorded conversations reveal. (He was also caught on tape at the time calling decorated war hero Senator John McCain “an old geezer with cancer.”)
⁶⁵

Behind the scenes, though, Hooper is busy launching an aggressive new propaganda campaign to depict CAIR as a civil-rights champion in league with the NAACP. CAIR is strengthening its alliance with the Congressional Black Caucus and has elected a black Muslim convert as its chairman in an effort to conflate the African-American struggle with the Muslim experience in America.

Newly elected CAIR chairman Shaw, a longtime North Carolina state senator and vice chairman of that state’s legislative black caucus, has likened the U.S. government’s co-conspirator charge against CAIR to the FBI’s surveillance of civil rights leaders in the 1960s.

“We look forward to partnering with the Obama administration to help defend civil liberties,” he says.
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Career FBI case agents say CAIR is doubling down on what has worked in the past. For over a decade, it’s managed to hide its true agenda of supporting violent jihad and militant Islam under the cover of civil-rights advocacy.

“I don’t care how many times they tell you they’re a civil rights organization, they’re not,” says a senior FBI agent in Washington. “They’re a front group for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.”
⁶⁷

Of course, if CAIR openly confessed its true mission, it wouldn’t get a toe in the door of official Washington.

The nature of CAIR’s very existence is a lie. And it doesn’t just wildly exaggerate the size and influence of the American Muslim population it claims to represent. It also wildly exaggerates its own size and influence, as we reveal in the next chapter with data from its own records.

“CAIR is very concerned about its reputation in the community. Without the community
(
and Allah’s help
)
CAIR would fail.”

—Former CAIR Civil-Rights Manager Joshua Salaam
¹

C
AIR
PROMOTES ITSELF
as “the most influential Muslim organization in America, with more than thirty chapters and offices nationwide and in Canada.” It claims to be the official representative of all Muslim Americans. And it has carefully crafted an image of itself as professional, authoritative, credible, and most of all, powerful.

So powerful, in fact, that it can, at a moment’s notice, marshal millions of angry Muslim voters or boycotters against Washington politicians or Fortune 500 companies who balk at its demands.

At least that’s the image that CAIR projects.

But it’s all blu?. Pull back the curtain on its internal operations and one discovers a largely hollow organization running a skeletal staff with high turnover and poor worker morale.

Internal communications and financial statements also reveal an organization struggling to stay afloat. CAIR is suffering from steadily shrinking membership dues and fundraising revenues, and has been operating at a loss for years.

Like the Wizard of Oz who used smoke and mirrors to transform his modest stature into something larger than life, CAIR furiously works its own levers and buttons to create an illusion of size and power. From behind the curtain, it thunders warnings not to arouse the wrath of the great and powerful CAIR; but without the veil, it stands exposed as a fraud.

Only through sheer
chutzpah
has CAIR been able to convince the Washington punditry it’s a force to be reckoned with. Only through threats and intimidation has it been able to extract the concessions it has from corporate America, which often cowers before it, oblivious to its wile and deception.

From behind its loud speakers and smoke machine in Washington, CAIR has created a mythical status that’s allowed it to impose itself on the national scene. But data from CAIR’s own files expose the baling wire and duct tape holding the myth together.

MYTH
: CAIR has a large, loyal, and dedicated work force.

FACT
: The organization suffers from high employee turnover, with churn rates running as high as 50 percent, and operates with barebones staff and field offices that in some cases are nothing more than mail drops.

Witness this 2004 warning to CAIR’s board from then-CAIR Director of Operations Khalid Iqbal: “I am very concerned about the employee turnover at CAIR National. Last year alone fourteen people left CAIR. That is more than 50 percent of our workforce.”

In the memo, Iqbal added that he was worried about “low employee moral [
sic
]” and “loss of thousands of dollars to CAIR.”
²

Negative comments made by exiting staffers included too much “micromanagement” by CAIR executives, he noted.

Iqbal himself left CAIR last year. And several other high-ups over the past two years have joined him, including:

In a separate report to the board, the former head of CAIR’s civil rights office complained that his department had “recently lost several experienced staff members.” In his two-page memo, civil rights manager Joshua Salaam added that “we began to take steps backwards.”
³

CAIR is also having a tough time recruiting new talent after prosecutors linked it to a conspiracy to raise funds for the terrorist group Hamas.

Not a few young activists have left CAIR fearing they’d be blackballed by government or corporate America for working for a terrorist-supporting group.

The negative publicity is taking its toll on CAIR’s internship program as well. Some interns last summer refused to have their photographs taken with CAIR, because they were afraid the images would come back to haunt them.

In fact, last year’s Washington interns are conspicuously absent from CAIR’s Web site. Despite coaxing from CAIR officials, interns broke with tradition and declined to be individually profiled on the group’s Web site.

CAIR’s national outreach coordinator, Raabia Wazir, expressed her disappointment last July in an email to the class of interns. She blamed “right-wing” detractors for the revolt.

Here is her message, written under the subject line: “Regarding the Online Intern Profiles,” which she copied to CAIR executive director Awad and other headquarters officials:

Whistleblower intern Chris Gaubatz says CAIR had planned to use the profiles as part of a campaign to create a younger, edgier image to help in recruiting.

“This is why [Yaser] Tabbara [executive director of CAIR’s chapter in President Obama’s hometown of Chicago] and Raabia were so upset when the interns didn’t want their pictures on the Web site,” he says. “They were very stereotypical college students who looked and dressed the part of America’s youth, and CAIR wanted them to be front and center on the Web site.”

Several interns told Gaubatz they did not plan to list their CAIR experience on their resumés.

They are not alone. Even some former high-level CAIR officials have scrubbed their association with the group.

Subhani, for one, recently removed references to CAIR from his blog. And Iftikhar, despite working for several years at CAIR’s headquarters, chose not to list his position there in his extensive bio posted on his personal Web site. There is not even an allusion to his work at CAIR in a
curriculum vitae
that runs almost five hundred words.
⁵

CAIR’S ‘CIVIL WAR’

What’s more, tension has been growing between CAIR’s board and Awad and spokesman Hooper, who have become mired in controversy and bad press.

In fact, some members of the board recently wanted to push out the two founding executives, but reconsidered out of fear the organization would flounder absent their experience and institutional knowledge.

Insiders say former chairman Parvez Ahmed, who chafed at CAIR’s “old guard mentality,” resigned after directors voted to keep Awad and Hooper on board. Ahmed argued for “new blood at the executive levels” and greater transparency at the organization.
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The high-level dissension has become so intense that insiders refer to it as CAIR’s “civil war.” Bad blood even developed between old friends Awad and co-founder and former chairman Omar Ahmad, who retired from CAIR’s board earlier this year.

Things got so rough for Hooper that at one point he was told by a director to stop talking to the media and consider working from his home. There was a time when he thought the board was monitoring his emails.
⁷

Hooper couldn’t understand why the board turned against him and Awad, and openly speculated that someone on the board had been “blackmailed,” according to a transcription of a conversation with Hooper that Gaubatz videotaped at last year’s ISNA convention. CAIR’s spokesman is convinced of an outside “conspiracy” to divide CAIR.
⁸

MYTH
: CAIR represents all Muslims.

FACT
: CAIR discriminates against Shiite Muslims—including its own employees who identify with that minority sect of Islam—and doesn’t really represent all Muslims, even as it sues other employers for discriminating against Muslims.

“CAIR’s constituency represents an even broader base” than Arab, South Asian, or African-American Muslims, Awad claims. “Many Muslims turn to it for help when facing job or religious discrimination.”

But where do CAIR employees turn when they’ve been discriminated against by CAIR? Tannaz Haddadi found out the hard way.

A Shiite Muslim, Haddadi says she was “completely dishonored and mistreated” by senior CAIR managers because of her religious background while working in the membership department at CAIR’s national office in Washington.