On December 8, 2023, my wife, our dog Daisy, and I headed to California. Checking into a motel in Green River Utah, we turned on the news. There was Nihad Awad, telling an audience how glad he was to see Gazans on October 7 throwing off their shackles and setting foot on land of which they had been dispossessed decades ago.
Fox News had a field day with that. It undoubtedly fed Islamophobia, for the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations to seemingly praise the Hamas attack. And since Islamophobia, real and imagined, keeps CAIR in business, I guess Awad’s talk was all in the way of job security.
The White House went to some effort to distance itself from CAIR, the latter being one of many Muslim organizations the Biden administration was working with to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.
CAIR then issued a statement explaining that Awad had been referring to non-Hamas Gazans who had crossed the border after Hamas fighters had burst through. That would have been important information to have included in the first place, were it true.
CAIR’s explanation was no more believable than its claim that it has no tolerance for sexual misconduct.
I did not rush to write this post. And it is just as well. Today the New York Times published an important article on the sexual violence Hamas perpetrated on October 7 (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/world/middleeast/oct-7-attacks-hamas-israel-sexual-violence.html?campaign_id=57&emc=edit_ne_20231228&instance_id=111207&nl=the-evening®i_id=69650493&segment_id=153756&te=1&user_id=442ce0b401d493bbed3b950d84a408c8). As if we needed more evidence of the depravity of Hamas.
The best argument against U.S. support for Netanyahu’s’ “mighty vengeance” on the Palestinians is that it can only create more Hamas recruits among an enraged population. As Arab leaders have put it, anyone who thinks Israel can destroy Hamas simply does not know what he is talking about.
But as we make this argument, we need to make very clear that Hamas is one big disgrace to Islam, just as Netanyahu and his partners in crime are a total disgrace to Judaism.
Our job is tough enough without the head of the most visible American Muslim organization seemingly praising Hamas.
As one CAIR chapter official mused some years ago, CAIR has certainly made a name for itself. But is that a good thing for American Muslims?
Reform CAIR 