The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that it is working with a coalition of leftwing, far-left, and Muslim Brotherhood organizations to demand that the FB remove what it calls “anti-Muslim bias” from its training system. According to a CAIR press release:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 21, 2011 — /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today joined a coalition of other civil rights and advocacy organizations in calling on the FBI to eliminate anti-Muslim bias from the system used to train its agents. At a press conference this morning outside FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., CAIR and the other groups expressed concerns about persistent reports that FBI agents are trained to view mainstream American Muslims with suspicion and to view the faith of Islam itself as the source of terrorism and extremism. News conference participants –- including representatives of CAIR, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Defending Dissent Foundation, and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Council for Social Justice — called for internal reforms to deal with the issue.
Defending Dissent describes itself as:
….founded in 1960 as the National Committee to Abolish HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee). Along the way we changed our name to the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation (NCARL)… and garnered the attention of J.Edgar Hoover for our outspoken advocacy in defense of the right to dissent.
The Defending Dissent Board includes Asst. Treasurer Hussein Ibish, a well-known Arab-American activist who is now Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and Chip Berlet, far left activist who is the the senior analyst at Political Research Associates.
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee describes itself as:
…a national non-profit grassroots organization. We defend the rule of law and rights and liberties challenged by overbroad national security and counter-terrorism policies. We support an ideologically, ethnically, geographically, and generationally diverse grassroots movement to protect and restore these principles by encouraging widespread civic participation; educating people about the significance of our rights; and cultivating grassroots networks to convert concern, outrage, and fear into debate and action.
The Advisory Board includes David Cole, a Georgetown university professor who frequently sides with Muslim Brotherhood organizations, and Daniel Ellsberg, e well-known former United States military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war era.
The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) is a less well-known part of the Muslim Brotherhood network in the U.S., generally thought to be closely tied to the Jamaat-e-Islami organization of Southeast Asia, itself known to be allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. ICNA is particularly close to the Muslim American Society, a part of the US Muslim Brotherhood and tied to the Egyptian organization, and the two organizations have been holding joint annual conventions for many years. Previous posts have discussed ICNA ad campaigns intended to present Islam to the U.S. public. The New York campaign drew national media attention when it was reported that Siraj Wahajj, an American Islamic convert associated with the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was behind the New York campaign.
Documents released in the Holy Land Trial have revealed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as identifying the organization itself as being part of the US. Brotherhood. A recent post discussed an interview with the Deputy leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in which he confirms a relationship between his organization and CAIR. Investigative research posted on GMBDW had determined that CAIR had it origins in the U.S. Hamas infrastructure and CAIR and its leaders have a long history of defending almost all individuals accused of terrorism by the US. government, frequently calling such prosecutions a “war on Islam.” In 2009, a US federal judge ruled “The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.”