The US-based Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has announced that its Chicago office was visited yesterday by Tawakkol Karman, the winner of a 2011 Nobel Peace prize and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen. According to the announcement:
Tawakkul Karman
On June 4, Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkol Karman visited the CAIR-Chicago office to say thank you for the support and the organization’s work. Tawakkol Karman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 in recognition of her work in nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peacebuilding work in Yemen. Upon being awarded the prize, Tawakkol became the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate to date, at the age of 32. Karman is a mother of three as well as a human rights activist, journalist, politician, and senior member of the Al-Islah political party.
In October 2011, we was the first media source to report on Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman’s ties to the Al-Islah Party of Yemen, the Yemeni branch of the Global Muslim Brotherhood. The week after Ms. Karman was awarded the Nobel Prize, Qatari media reported that she met with Global Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi in Doha, and told him that since childhood she had enjoyed reading his books. Qaradawi reportedly gave her several of his writings, including his book Fiqh Al-Jihad. Given her position as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, it should be noted that Qaradawi’s fatwas in support of suicide bombings against Israeli citizens were utilized by Hamas to justify their operations.
In August 2013, we reported that Ms. Karman had written an article for Foreign Policy magazine in which she called deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi “the Arab World’s Mandela” and argued that “we must stand and support the Muslim Brotherhood’s fight for democracy.” During that same month Ms. Karman was apprehended at the Cairo airport and prevented from entering Egypt.
In February, we reported that Ms. Karman had been severely criticized by local media for demanding that local Jews be allowed in government positions.
CAIR was founded in 1994 by three officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine, part of the U.S. Hamas infrastructure at that time. Documents discovered in the course of the terrorism trial of the Holy Land Foundation confirmed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood and that CAIR itself is part of the US. Muslim Brotherhood. In 2008, the then Deputy leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood acknowledged a relationship between the Egyptian Brotherhood and CAIR. 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.” CAIR and its leaders have had a long history of defending individuals accused of terrorism by the US. government, often labeling such prosecutions a “war on Islam”, and have also been associated with Islamic fundamentalism and antisemitism. The organization is led by Nihad Awad, its longstanding Executive Director and one of the three original founders.
