For years now, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been running a scam on the American people. It has pretended to be a respectable civil rights and civic-engagement organization while at the same time surreptitiously supporting radical Islamic and anti-Semitic causes.

The linkage is so strong that when you hear “CAIR” you should think “Hamas.”

Sadly, CAIR hasn’t done it alone. Its willing accomplices include the mainstream media, which doesn’t much care for the state of Israel, and many members of Congress, who don’t much care for being called Islamophobes.

CAIR was cofounded in 1994 by Nihad Awad, who is now the organization’s executive director, and who recently said that he was “happy to see” the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and that the Jewish state did not have a right to self-defense because it is an “occupying power.”

Context is important, though: “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege — the walls of the concentration camp — on October 7,” said Awad at the 16th Annual Convention for Palestine on November 24 in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land that they were not free to walk in. And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense — have the right to defend themselves. And yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”

That’s the message. That’s the takeaway. The event’s organizers claimed it to be “a resounding success,” even as they scrambled to find a venue when the original location, the Chicago Hyatt Regency O'Hare, canceled on them a month beforehand due to threats. “People from around the nation gathered under somber circumstances,” a press release stated, “while our brothers and sisters in Gaza dug bodies out of the rubble and struggled to find food and water to stay alive. However, we were determined to show our people in Gaza that we would not allow attempts to shut us down and prevent us from gathering our community, celebrating our culture, learning about our history, and telling the stories of our martyrs.”

Just think: Had the conventioneers’ Hamas colleagues not launched a barbaric and unprovoked attack on innocent Israeli civilians on October 7; had they not murdered 1,200 Israelis; had they not gang-raped Israeli women and put Israeli babies into ovens, their “brothers and sisters in Gaza” wouldn’t be digging bodies out of the rubble and struggling to find food and water to stay alive. So it goes.

What did the speakers at this conference expect Israel to do in the wake of Hamas’s slaughter of its people — shrug its shoulders?

As for Awad, he’s now taking heat for his comments, and rightly so. And he says — wait for it! — he was misquoted. “What I actually said,” he said after saying what he said, “while discussing international law: Ukrainians, Palestinians and other occupied people have the right to defend themselves and escape occupation by just and legal means, but targeting civilians is never an acceptable means of doing so, which is why I have again and again condemned the violence against Israeli civilians on October 7th and past Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings, all the way back to the 1990s.”

Uh-huh.

Awad also claimed that his reference to feeling “happy” wasn’t about the slaughter of Israelis but about Gazans briefly entering Israeli territory as a “symbolic act of defiance.” Unfortunately for Awad, the slaughter of Israelis was the fundamental act of the “defiance.” The two events are inseparable.

As for CAIR, the nation’s leading Islamic organization, its longstanding connections to Hamas are clear and undeniable. As Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes wrote in National Review back in 2014: “Hamas, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and many other governments, indirectly created CAIR and the two groups remain tight. Examples: In 1994, CAIR head Nihad Awad publicly declared his support for Hamas; the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), a Hamas front group, contributed $5,000 to CAIR; in turn, CAIR exploited the 9/11 attacks to raise money for HLF; and, this past August, demonstrators at a CAIR-sponsored rally in Florida proclaimed ‘We are Hamas!’”

We are Hamas! That’s our guy Nihad Awad. The voice of CAIR. Ya can’t make this stuff up.

The Republican National Committee’s crack research team recently laid out an interesting timeline of embarrassment for the Biden administration: “MAY: Biden admin releases a ‘strategy to counter antisemitism’ and lists the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a partner. NOV. 24: CAIR ED Nihad Awad says he was ‘happy to see’ the attack on Israel.” And then, on December 7: “Biden admin quietly scrubs CAIR from the ‘strategy.’”

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.