“I was happy to see people breaking the siege.”

Thus spake Nihad Awad, the cofounder and longtime executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an address to the annual American Muslims for Palestine convention in November. He was explaining why the Oct. 7 Hamas terror assault in Israel filled him with joy.

“The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7,” Awad told his audience, employing the antisemitic device of likening Israel to Nazi Germany. “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 allowed to walk in.”

The slaughter of more than 1,200 civilians, the frenzied sexual mutilation of women and girls, the burning of homes with families in them, the abduction of hundreds of hostages, the worst massacre of Jews since the end of the Holocaust — in Awad’s telling, that was simply the people of Gaza engaging in their “right of self-defense.” He made no reference to Hamas. Instead, he emphasized that Israel was not entitled to defend itself. “Yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense.”

When an excerpt of Awad’s speech was made public on Dec. 7 by the Middle East Media and Research Institute, it drew an appalled rebuke from the Biden administration.

“We condemn these shocking, antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” presidential spokesman Andrew Bates told reporters. The Hamas atrocities “shock the conscience,” he said, and “every leader has a responsibility to call out antisemitism wherever it rears its ugly head.” Last spring, the White House included CAIR in a list of organizations supporting its National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. After Awad’s comments became known, CAIR’s name was scrubbed from the document.

To hear Awad tell it, CAIR is being unfairly maligned. An “anti-Palestinian hate website selected remarks from my speech out of context and spliced them together to create a completely false meaning,” he claimed after his comments became known. All he had meant to say was that “average Palestinians who briefly walked out of Gaza and set foot on their ethnically cleansed land in a symbolic act of defiance against the blockade and stopped there without engaging in violence were within their rights under international law.”

There are a few problems with Awad’s protestation of innocence. For starters, MEMRI, the media database that called attention to the CAIR director’s speech, is a highly regarded source of accurate information from across the Arab and Muslim world. Far from being a “hate website” as Awad described it, MEMRI strives to convey the entire scope of Arab/Muslim discourse — good and bad, ugly and admirable. It makes a point of focusing as much on reform in the Muslim world as it does on jihad and Islamism.

If Awad’s words had really been taken out of context, the easiest way to prove it would be to let people view online the entire recording of his speech for themselves. Only — it’s gone. American Muslims for Palestine, the group that organized the conference at which Awad spoke, has taken down the video of his remarks. Hmm.

CAIR holds itself out as a Muslim human rights organization, and that is how it is routinely described in news stories and headlines. CAIR-sponsored publicity events are given media coverage, and CAIR is invited to participate in — and at times even to host — roundtable events with local government officials. Journalists often turn to CAIR for comment in stories dealing with American Muslims and conventionally describe CAIR as “the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights group.” One week before the Oct. 7 attacks, CAIR was invited to attend a White House program on “protecting places of worship.”

But CAIR has a long history of sympathy with, and connections to, Hamas.

In 1994, the same year that Awad cofounded CAIR, he candidly told a Florida audience that he was “in support of the Hamas movement more than the PLO.” According to the Capital Research Center, CAIR opened its office in Washington, D.C., with a grant from the Holy Land Foundation, a charity listed by the Treasury Department in 2001 as a “Specially Designated Terrorist” group. In 2008, five former leaders of the foundation were convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. A year later, the Obama Justice Department severed its ties with CAIR, noting that “the evidence at trial [had] linked CAIR leaders to Hamas … and CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case.” FBI officials were directed to “significantly restrict” any “non-investigative interactions with CAIR” and to steer clear of including CAIR in community engagement or public relations activities.

Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, noted in 2014 that at least seven former board members or staff at CAIR were “arrested, denied entry to the US, or were indicted on or pled guilty to or were convicted of terrorist charges.” In 2014, the United Arab Emirates included CAIR on a list of more than 83 terrorist organizations, along with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban.

For all that, CAIR insists that it is “principled and consistent” in opposing antisemitism. It regularly issues press releases condemning acts of antisemitic vandalism or violence in the United States. But such statements are best regarded as protective coloration intended to camouflage CAIR’s mission of encouraging hostility to Israel and Israel’s supporters in the United States.

Again and again, CAIR officials have let the mask slip.

Last February, for example, the head of CAIR’s Los Angeles branch, Hussam Ayloush, declared that American police forces are “becoming more brutal, more racist, and more like an occupation army” because they are “being trained by Israel.” In December 2021, the head of CAIR’s San Francisco chapter exhorted supporters to oppose not only “vehement fascists” but “the polite Zionists, too,” labeling as “enemies” the Anti-Defamation League, Jewish federations, “the Zionist synagogues,” and Hillel chapters on college campuses. In October, CAIR’s Maryland director, Zainab Chaudry, sneered at the outrage over Hamas’s killing of “40 fake Israeli babies.”

Whatever else CAIR is, it is no true champion of civil rights and interfaith harmony and never has been. In 2021, the Simon Wiesenthal Center put CAIR on its Global Antisemitism Top Ten list, charging it with “unleashing pollution of antisemitism into America’s mainstream.” Thirty years after CAIR was launched by a cofounder who openly acknowledged being in support of Hamas, it remains a front for Islamist extremism and anti-Zionist bigotry. To treat it as a legitimate “civil rights organization” that speaks for US Muslims is to set back the causes of civil rights and Muslims alike.