The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has issued a press release opposing the appointment of Charles M. Kupperman as acting national security adviser based on his service on the board of the Center for Security Policy (CSP). According to the release:
September 10, 2019 The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today said it is “appalled” by the appointment of Charles M. Kupperman as acting national security adviser following the resignation of John Bolton. From 2001 to 2010, Kupperman served on the board of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), an organization headed by notorious Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has identified Gaffney as an anti-Muslim extremist and designated the CSP as a hate group, calling the latter “a conspiracy-oriented mouthpiece for the growing anti-Muslim movement in the United States.” CSP is famous for promoting the conspiracy theory that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated all levels of the U.S. government and that Sharia law is on the rise in America. While we welcome the resignation of John Bolton, who has a long track record of promoting anti-Muslim policies and associating with hate groups, we cannot simply replace one Islamophobe with another,” said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad . “CSP has continuously promoted Islamophobic conspiracy theories, and anyone, like Mr. Kupperman, who has so closely associated with them for so long is — at the very least — complicit in their brand of anti-Muslim bigotry and should not be entrusted with one of the highest ranking security roles in the United States.” In January, CAIR opposed Kupperman’s appointment as Deputy National Security Adviser, citing the same concerns.
Read the rest here.
It is rare that the GMBDW and CAIR, a part of the US Muslim Brotherhood, find themselves on the same side of any issue. We also oppose the appointment of Kupperman for the same reason that in November 2016 we opposed the appointment of rightwing ideologue Clare Lopez to the position of Deputy National Security Advisor in the Trump Administration. With respect to the “infiltration” hypothesis, we wrote at that time that the GMBDW has long been on record as taking issue with this notion which was the subject of our August 2014 post titled “Once More Into The Breach; Has The Muslim Brotherhood Infiltrated The US Government?” As we noted in that post, although the GMBDW was the original source for information on most of the individuals in question, this information was later employed for less than savory ends:
More recently, an additional challenge has emerged, namely the use of GMBDW research to spin unsubstantiated and fanciful stories about the same networks we have so carefully tried to document. The most egregious example is the claim, since gone viral, that the Muslim Brotherhood has “infiltrated” the Obama administration. Stories based on this alleged infiltration typically feature rogues galleries of “Muslim Brotherhood operatives” said to be whispering in the ear of the Obama administration and aimed at causing the downfall of the United States. In most cases, the stories include high-profile individuals first identified by the GMBDW as tied to the Global Muslim Brotherhood using criteria we have long since publicly explained.
We refer readers to that post where we extensively debunk the notion of such infiltration and provide an alternative explanation for the presence of these individuals in the US government. As we have written, while the issue of Islamist influence on the US government is legitimate, the accusation of infiltration was at that time a distraction from the real issue which was the deliberate choice by the Obama administration, a mistake with a long historical precedent to somehow use the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist groups as a bulwark against forces deemed more threatening such as Al Qaeda. We also wrote in 2016 that Clare Lopez, Frank Gaffney, and the Center for Security Policy are also perhaps the foremost proponents of what might be called the “Shariah Hypothesis” that we described in a 2013 post as follows:
It is a popular and widespread notion in some quarters that everything that needs to be known about Islamists and Islamism can be understood through reading classical Islamic texts. Such texts are said to represent an unchanging “Islamic Doctrine” that is at the core of not only Islamism but of Islam itself and therefore, it is argued, there is no essential difference between Islamism and Islam. Nowhere is this notion more prevalent than when it come to the issue of antisemitism in the Islamic world which is said in these same quarters to stem directly from Koranic and Islamic classic teachings about Jews. The conclusion is drawn that since these texts contain derogatory references to Jews, that Islam itself is unalterably and forever antisemitic and that Islamists simply derive their views straight from the Koran. This “It’s all in the Koran hypothesis” is central to the writings of an assorted collection of ideologues, religious zealots, pundits, and outright extremists who are either unfamiliar with anything resembling genuine scholarship on these issues or choose simply to ignore it for reasons of their own.
Since that time, the US mainstream media posture on anything related to the Muslim Brotherhood in the US has only gotten worse. For example, the media in the US by and large refused to even consider the Global Muslim Brotherhood links of the murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi which we documented in October 2018. Apropos to this post, in November 2018 we were the first media outlet to report that Khashoggi was actually working together with CAIR leader Nihad Awad on Khashoggi’s “Islamic Democracy” promotion project. We continue to believe that it is the pernicious influence of organizations like CSI that hinder our ability to get such information heard and is therefor worthwhile repeating what we wrote in 2016 when following our posts, one reader asked us bluntly “Why is GMBW going weak now?” As we said then and continue to believe:
We believe this question shows a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the GMBDW. Although we have been one of the most consistent and most critical voices long working to combat the pernicious influences of the Global Muslim Brotherhood, we do not consider “the enemy of our enemy to be our friend.” We have in the past characterized the anti-Shariah movement and similar ideological forces as “an assorted collection of ideologues, religious zealots, pundits, and outright extremists who are either unfamiliar with anything resembling genuine scholarship on these issues or choose simply to ignore it for reasons of their own.” We see no reason to change that characterization now and as we have written above and in the past, it is the view of those espousing the Shariah Hypothesis which have made our work almost impossible in the US as those in the media and other relevant actors seem so intent on refuting this extremism that they appear to refuse to event consider properly covering the subject. We have discussed this phenomenon at length in March in our post titled “The Republican Candidates, Islamophobia, and the Muslim Brotherhood- Please Don’t Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater.” (Interestingly, the UK has not yet succumbed to the ideological polarization on these issues and it is indeed still possible there to be heard by the mainstream media as we did with the Times of London who credited us for assisting in their investigation of the UK Muslim Brotherhood.) As to our timing in seemingly now adopting a more aggressive posture in this regard, the GMBDW believes given all that is going on politically in the world today, it is more important than ever for people of goodwill ever to speak their minds forcibly in the interests of our rare and precious democracies. We do not view this as weakness.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as “a grassroots civil rights and advocacy group and as “America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group.” 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.