Muslim Mafia (6 page)

“Every day, CAIR works hard to defend the rights of American Muslims who encounter a delay in gaining citizenship,” the group said in an advertisement promoting its fundraiser. “Let’s help CAIR reach its goal of $250,000 so that CAIR can continue to defend our rights.”

Its home page featured a button linking visitors to a donation page, along with photos of Muslims receiving certificates of U.S. citizenship. “CAIR helped me,” one Muslim is quoted as saying. (He is identified as Chokri el-Kotel, the same client-victim who had previously complained about CAIR. He agreed to give a testimonial only after CAIR bought him off with partial restitution and stepped in, belatedly, to handle his case.)

Not featured, of course, were the other still angry twenty-nine clients that CAIR had ripped off with fraudulent fees for undelivered immigration and other legal services.

CAIR’s fundraising pitch still centers on the boast that it helps Muslims with citizenship delays. It’s one of the group’s top selling points. Days had fit into that strategy.

Far from just a “contractor,” the fifty-four-year-old Days was brought in as a rainmaker for CAIR, which promoted him with great fanfare. Not long after hiring him in 2006, CAIR put out a slick newsletter trumpeting his arrival and his accomplishments, which included allegedly processing “over one hundred civil rights cases” already at the Maryland/Virginia chapter. CAIR proudly touted him and his alleged legal qualifications in an article titled “Meet Our Resident Attorney!” which included a photo of Days along with a solicitation for donations.
¹⁸

DRUMMING UP NEW BUSINESS

CAIR also encouraged Muslim immigrants to make appointments to see Days, a black convert to Islam, and avail themselves of his legal services. What’s more, CAIR promoted Days in press releases and on its national Web site, drumming up new business for him—and new fundraising opportunities for CAIR.

In a July 2007 press release, CAIR sang Days’s praises while calling on the Department of Homeland Security to expedite Muslim citizenship cases he was supposedly working on for Muslims in Maryland and Virginia. The press release led to a spate of sob stories in the media.

“Every citizen and permanent resident has a right to expect fundamental fairness,” it quoted Days as saying. He called on immigration authorities to “do the right thing” and rubber stamp U.S. documentation for Muslim foreigners.

All the while, on his end, Days wasn’t doing much of anything. Clients complained he’d routinely stand them and immigration officials up at scheduled meetings and sometimes wouldn’t even show up for court dates. Some clients were strung along for several months after paying him a retainer.

In fact, some of the Muslims he garnered publicity for helping later proved to be the same victims he fraudulently shook down for fees. Consider the case of Issameldin Mohamed. CAIR posted on its main Web site an Associated Press story under the headline: “CAIR-MD/VA: Lawsuits End Citizenship Delays.” It highlighted with boldface type the following section of the December 2007 article:

If Mohamed was “helped,” he wasn’t helped very much. He’s the same Issameldin Mohamed mentioned at the beginning of this chapter who was so “upset” with Days that he called CAIR demanding a refund of the fees he paid him.

Still, CAIR couldn’t stop promoting their star pseudo-attorney. Days also was featured in an NBC News story that aired around the same time. CAIR promptly posted a link to the video under the headline, “CAIR-MD/VA: Muslims Granted Citizenship,” along with a photo of Days.

The media publicity didn’t end there. ABC News and the
Washington Post
also picked up on the angle of the “legal director for CAIR’s Maryland and Virginia chapter” heroically rescuing Muslim immigrants from xenophobic government gatekeepers. Days was quoted in the
Post
story blaming citizenship and visa delays on post-9/11 discrimination. He demanded federal officials expedite the cases he was working on—or not working on, as it turned out.

No matter, what was important to CAIR was that the immigration cases attracted good publicity at the time. And the more media, the more donations. Seeing that Muslims actually get help was secondary.

And Days attracted a lot of media for CAIR. In fact, he got so much ink that he ranked as one of the most visible “lawyers” in the country, according to Martindale-Hubbell, which mistakenly listed Days in its directory of attorneys. In fact, he ranked number one of forty-one lawyers in the Herndon area. Little wonder CAIR looked the other way when it all went bad.

COUNSELING FOR THE CON ARTIST

Iqbal knew Days was fraudulently collecting legal fees from CAIR clients at least by November 2007. And he and the CAIR board took no action against him until February 2008—a delay of a minimum of three months.

And even then, they didn’t fire him. They first gave him a warning and kept him on staff, even after learning of the malpractice he committed against so many CAIR clients while using CAIR offices, CAIR letterhead, and CAIR equipment. They finally sacked him after the complaints continued unabated.
¹⁹

But even then, they didn’t turn him over to the proper authorities or alert the relevant state bar associations about his con. Instead, emails reveal, they sought out a local Muslim cleric to “give him counseling,” because he was “shaken and disturbed” by the news of his termination.
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They tolerated him ripping off clients until those clients threatened to blow the whistle in the media. Only then did they throw Days under the bus, because, as they explained to him in his termination notice, his continued association with CAIR endangered the reputation of “the organization as a whole.” In other words, it was more what he was doing to CAIR than what he was doing to Muslims that was the firing offense. CAIR would look bad if it got out that an advocacy group victimizes the very people it is supposed to represent.

What really looks bad is that these weren’t just any Muslims but poor immigrant Muslims who put their faith and trust in CAIR—and their hopes and dreams in the hands of its legal team. They also put their life savings in CAIR’s hands. And CAIR returned the favor by never alerting them to Days’s schemes or even letting them know he wasn’t really a lawyer.

Sadly, it took an unpaid non-employee—a non-Muslim posing as a Muslim—to blow the whistle on senior CAIR managers victimizing fellow Muslims in their care.

After just a few months into his internship at CAIR, it became clear to undercover investigator Chris Gaubatz that CAIR doesn’t really care about Muslim hardship cases.

“CAIR is interested only in things that get media attention or raise money,” he says.

When he stumbled on the Days fraud, laid out in the files on Iqbal’s desk, he took the files into the copier room and photocopied the evidence in them then returned the files to the desk.

“We knew we had an obligation [under whistleblowing statutes] to preserve evidence” of corruption or criminal activity, Gaubatz said. “So any time I was told to shred evidence, I would preserve it instead.”

He also later came across evidence germane to the Days case in the storage room of the Herndon office.

All this evidence is now being used in a class-action lawsuit against CAIR naming Awad and other CAIR officials as defendants. (In fact, an unsuspecting Awad was served a court summons while conducting ceremonies at CAIR’s fourteenth annual banquet in Arlington, Virginia’s Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel, the same banquet where Gaubatz worked security.) Some of CAIR’s former clients claim they suffered “severe emotional stress” from the scheme and seek compensatory and punitive damages, which may be recoverable from CAIR’s real estate and other assets valued at more than $6 million.

CAIR, which describes the Days fraud as an “unfortunate situation,”
²¹
has filed a motion to dismiss the federal case, which is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

CAIR maintains that it was just as much a victim of Days’s fraud as his clients. It claims it did not know he was misrepresenting himself and the public as an attorney licensed to practice law.

However, Days’s resumé was so transparently bogus any employer could have seen though it. Problem was, CAIR failed to conduct even the most basic background check prior to hiring him. If it had, it would have found glaring inaccuracies and inconsistencies in his story.

While CAIR was negligent in hiring him, it was reckless in promoting his qualifications to the local Muslim community. Here is CAIR’s misleading profile of him in a 2007 newsletter offering his legal services to Muslims:

Sounds impressive. Only none of the representations were true. Days, who died early in 2009, was not a lawyer. He never got a law degree nor was he licensed as an attorney to practice law in any jurisdiction in the United States.

Even the award is bogus.

JAILHOUSE LAWYER

CAIR knew or had reason to know that Days was not licensed to practice law in Virginia when it hired him. A simple search shows he was not admitted to the Virginia state bar. And his email address—[email protected]—which CAIR posted in its newsletter, is not even affiliated with the American Bar Association. (ABAnet.org is the domain for the American Bar Association. ABA.net is the domain for a diploma mill.)

CAIR even had Days lead monthly “legal literacy classes” for local Muslims at its Herndon office—“in order to empower our community to enact the legal protections afforded to us as American Muslims.”

“Days himself kicked off the new project with a two-hour ‘Introduction to American Law’ class last month,” CAIR gushed in a March 2007 newsletter promoting his so-called law classes. “The aim of this class is to provide community members with a solid background of civil rights and local and national law.”

This is most amusing, as the only law that Days really knew is what he learned inside the correctional system—as an inmate. That’s right; the con artist that CAIR hired was also an ex-con who served time in Philadelphia jails in the 1990s, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism. He also was found guilty of several alcohol-related charges in Virginia in the early 2000s.

The Days affair serves as a cautionary tale for CAIR’s remaining paid members (whose numbers have shrunk dramatically in recent years, as a forthcoming chapter will detail). CAIR hired an ex-con shakedown artist posing as a lawyer to misrepresent more than one hundred of its members, fired him only after his victims threatened to go to the press, and then covered up the criminal fraud by threatening the poor Muslim clients he ripped off to keep their mouths shut.

But that’s par for the course for a criminal organization. CAIR even hires terrorists—then defends them after they’re convicted and sentenced to prison.

“We’ve been actively working cases against CAIR for awhile, including key administration there.”

—Senior investigator, FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington
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T
HE
M
UMBAI MASSACRE
ranks as one of history’s grisliest acts of retail terrorism. In the fall of 2008, a dozen young Muslim men armed with AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and plastic explosives stormed a train station, the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, and a Jewish center in Mumbai, India, and slaughtered in cold blood about 160 people, including six Americans. They singled out Western tourists and Jews for attack. The barbaric terrorists sexually humiliated some of the hotel guests by first forcing them to strip, then shooting them. Police found the blood-drenched bodies of a
rabbi
and his wife completely nude, their genitalia mutilated.

These jihad-crazed troglodytes, who were ordered to “kill until the last breath” in the name of Islam, carried out their killing spree after training in neighboring Pakistan. Over five months they practiced their assault at a camp run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaida subcontractor.

Several years earlier, an American Muslim convert purchased the same weapon—an AK-47, the weapon of choice for jihadists—along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and practiced shooting it at a firing range near his home in the Washington DC area. Then he traveled to Pakistan to train for real at a Lashkar-e-Taiba camp similar to the one the Mumbai terrorists attended. He even fired live AK-47 rounds at Indian targets.

When this convert, Randall “Ismail” Royer, returned to Washington, he went back to work for his employer, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“I was the civil rights guy at CAIR, taking phone calls about women getting spit on, the FBI barging into houses where a woman was taking a shower and yanking her out of the shower,” Royer said, his words dripping with contempt.

All the while he was training and plotting revenge against the U.S. government.

FBI agents eventually barged into his house in northern Virginia and locked him up before he could carry out his violent plans. If they hadn’t arrested him, his path might have merged with Lashkar-e-Taiba’s in Mumbai, as the terror group was recruiting English-speaking operatives for its cell there.

Or worse, Royer might have joined an attack against the homeland. Lashkar-e-Taiba had at one point solicited his own Virginia-based cell to case a chemical plant in Maryland, federal prosecutors say.
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It’s plain that America is a target of the terrorist group, whose offices in Lahore, Pakistan, are plastered with anti-American posters, according to U.S. government witnesses.

In fact, Royer was the ringleader of a group known as the Virginia Jihad Network that had been studying manuals on how to manufacture and use explosives and chemical weapons. Among other targets, it had been casing the FBI headquarters building.

One of their confederates, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, even trained with al-Qaida to assassinate President George W. Bush.

Royer is now behind bars, serving a twenty-year federal sentence. But from 1997 to 2001, he worked for CAIR out of its Washington headquarters as a civil rights coordinator and communications specialist. He wrote news releases, spoke with journalists, conducted research, and monitored the media as an integral part of CAIR’s national propaganda campaign.

During his employment there, Royer admits introducing some of his terrorist co-conspirators to Lashkar-e-Taiba leaders and helping them gain entry to terrorist training camps in Pakistan, prosecutors say. At least one traveled there with his help before the September 11, 2001, attacks, while another went right afterward, court records show. Royer told them if they wanted to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan, they’d first need to participate in military training and that the camps in Pakistan were a good place to get that training. Royer still worked for CAIR through October 2001, when he resigned to rejoin the jihad overseas. He was arrested not long after returning home.
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The Justice Department charged the former high-level CAIR staffer with conspiring to wage war against the United States, aiding the Taliban and al-Qaida, and providing assistance to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Royer eventually pleaded guilty to lesser firearms- and explosives-related charges in exchange for his cooperation in the ongoing terrorism investigation.

Far from cooperating, however, Royer has worked tirelessly to appeal his conviction. Helping him in that effort is his old employer, CAIR.

FINDING A “LOOPHOLE” FOR ISMAIL

Despite overwhelming evidence of Royer’s treacherous plans to help the Taliban and al-Qaida kill American men and women in uniform after 9/11, CAIR has been working behind the scenes with Royer’s lawyer and wife to free him from prison. Confidential office memos show Royer’s case is a top item on CAIR’s executive agenda.
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CAIR’s legal department in Washington has been researching his appeal. Last summer, in fact, a CAIR legal intern from the University of Maryland law school, Fariha Quasem, was tasked with helping to find a “loophole” in the law to gain his release.
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CAIR has also defended would-be al-Qaida assassin Abu Ali, who was in regular contact with Royer’s group and participated in its paramilitary training. CAIR’s logbook for visitors to its Washington headquarters shows that Abu Ali’s father, who worked at the Saudi embassy, met with CAIR director Nihad Awad several months before his son’s 2005 terrorism conviction.
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CAIR’s continued interest in the Virginia Jihad case appears to go well beyond civil rights advocacy. Just what did CAIR know about its former employee’s activities, and when did it know it?

Terrorism experts say Lashkar-e-Taiba’s bold, coordinated attack on Westerners in Mumbai indicates the terror group is expanding its theater of operations, which may now include the U.S. They say the development is worrisome and begs for reinvestigation of CAIR’s connection to the Lashkar-e-Taiba cell in Virginia.

“CAIR’s civil rights coordinator in DC was the ringleader of that cell in Virginia,” says Walid Phares, a Ph.D. Middle East scholar and counterterrorism consultant for the U.S. government. “Based on Royer’s connection to L-e-T, it is important to now go back and question CAIR’s role.”
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CAIR’s connections to terrorists and extremists hardly end with Royer, who’s more the rule than the exception; and such ties are far more extensive than have been reported. These aren’t garden variety extremists, either. Some like Royer are hardened members of terrorist groups who plotted against the U.S. while still on CAIR’s payroll. They are sworn enemies in the war on terror, co-conspirators in the Islamic jihad against America.

And their resumés all have CAIR in common.

CAIR, which runs thirty-three offices and chapters nationwide, does not publicly disclose complete directories of its staff or advisors, current or historic. Nor does it make its federal tax filings, naming its officers and stakeholders, readily available to the public. All of which has left details about its associations sketchy.

But personnel records we’ve obtained, along with a review of federal tax and political donor records listing occupation, have helped fill in some of the gaps. Matching employee and volunteer worker names against legal databases reveals CAIR has been associated with an alarming number of convicted terrorists or felons in terrorism probes, as well as suspected terrorists and active targets of counterterrorism investigations. And our analysis is by no means exhaustive.

It’s been widely reported that three CAIR officials have been linked to terrorism, with Royer topping the list. But there are at least twelve other CAIR officials who have been caught up in terror investigations, bringing the grand total to at least fifteen.

In fact, federal and local authorities say CAIR’s offices have acted as a virtual turnstile for terrorists and their supporters.

“We’ve been actively working cases against CAIR for awhile, including key administration there,” says a senior investigator assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington.
⁸

And investigations, which continue apace, have resulted in convictions.

“CAIR has had a number of people in positions of power within the organization that have been directly connected to terrorism and have either been prosecuted or thrown out of the country,” says former FBI agent Mike Rolf.
⁹

Because of its growing terror ties and run-ins with the law, congressional leaders are warning lawmakers and other Washington officials to disassociate themselves from the group.

“Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States,” said U.S. Representative Sue Myrick (R-NC), co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus.

The organization itself recently was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel more than $12 million to the terrorist group Hamas. In the Holy Land Foundation case, federal prosecutors also listed CAIR as a member of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that gave rise to Hamas, al-Qaida, and other terrorist groups, and seeks to institutionalize Islamic law, or
Shariah
, in America.

CAIR’s rap sheet is long and growing. In addition to Royer, whom we’ll count as number one, it includes the following officials:

MUTHANNA AL-HANOOTI

Federal agents last year charged the former CAIR regional director with conspiring to work for a foreign government and with making false statements to the FBI.

Al-Hanooti’s home was raided by FBI agents, who also searched the offices of his front group, Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, which al-Hanooti operates out of Dearborn, Michigan, and Washington DC.

FAAIR claims to be a consulting firm raising awareness of Sunni Muslim grievances in Iraq, but investigators say it’s a front that supported the Sunni-led insurgency.

Al-Hanooti, who immigrated to the U.S. from Iraq, formerly helped run a suspected Hamas terror front called LIFE for Relief and Development. Its Michigan offices also were raided in the investigation. In 2004, LIFE’s Baghdad office was raided by U.S. troops, who seized files and computers.
¹⁰

Al-Hanooti headed CAIR’s Michigan office after working briefly for CAIR National in Washington,
¹¹
and he is related to Sheik Mohammed al-Hanooti, whom the Justice Department named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He currently leads prayers at a Washington-area mosque that aided some of the 9/11 hijackers and is closely affiliated with CAIR.

The FBI alleges al-Hanooti, an ethnic Palestinian who also emigrated from Iraq, raised money for Hamas. In fact, “al-Hanooti collected over $6 million for support of Hamas,” according to a 2001 FBI report. He was also present with CAIR and Holy Land officials at a secret Hamas fundraising summit held last decade at a Philadelphia hotel.

Prosecutors recently added the sheik’s name to the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case.
¹²

LAURA JAGHLIT

A civil rights coordinator for CAIR,
¹³
her Washington-area home was raided by federal agents after 9/11 as part of an investigation into terrorist financing, money-laundering, and tax fraud. Her husband, Mohammed Jaghlit, a key leader in the Saudi-backed SAAR network, also known as the Safa group, has been a target of the still active probe. (The Safa group is a key financial hub in the Muslim Brotherhood crime syndicate, which is the focus of the second half of the book).

Mohammed Jaghlit, aka Mohammad El-Gajhleet, is a Brotherhood boss whom federal investigators describe as “an active supporter of Hamas.” Last decade, he sent two letters accompanying donations—one for $10,000, the other for $5,000—from the SAAR Foundation to Sami al-Arian, now a convicted terrorist. In each letter, according to a federal affidavit, “Jaghlit instructed al-Arian not to disclose the contribution publicly or to the media.”
¹⁴

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.
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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.
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