Ilhan Omar to speak at banquet for group known for terrorist group support

CAIR has a long history of affiliation with Hamas and Hezbollah. It was reportedly a co-conspirator in the largest terrorist financing case in US history, which went unindicted.

By ILANIT CHERNICK
Ilhan Omar speaks at an election night results party in Minneapolis, Nov. 6, 2018. (photo credit: STEPHEN MATUREN / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP)
Ilhan Omar speaks at an election night results party in Minneapolis, Nov. 6, 2018.
(photo credit: STEPHEN MATUREN / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP)
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is slated to speak next month at a benefit for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), known for supporting terrorist organizations that have acted against Israel and the United States.
The event, scheduled for March 23 in Los Angeles, is entitled “Advancing Justice, empowering Valley Muslims.”
CAIR has a long history of affiliation with the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. CAIR members have often defended the actions of Hamas in Gaza.
Further, FBI investigators uncovered evidence establishing CAIR's place in the "Palestine Committee," which was a Muslim Brotherhood-created network aimed at helping Hamas in the United States, according to a report by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. In 2009, US District Court Judge Jorge Solis ruled that there is "at least a prima facie case as to CAIR's involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas."
Moreover, the organization was officially designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates in 2014, placing it in the company of Al Qaeda, Islamic State and others.
Omar will be keynoting with Hassan Shibly, the executive director of CAIR-Florida, who is vehemently anti-Israel, believes that Hezbollah and Hamas are not terrorist organizations and is known for openly discriminating against LGBTs.
In 2014, Shibly claimed that the Hamas terror tunnels uncovered in Operation Protective Edge in the northern Gaza Strip were “being used in the defense of Palestine.”
At the time, he wrote that “to Israel, every tunnel – be it one that brings food into an impoverished Gaza Strip where over half of the population depends on food aid, or one that delivers sheep to a Khan Yunis farmer who lost his other farm animals to a prior Israeli incursion – is a “terror tunnel.”
The Conservative Review reported that director of CAIR-Los Angeles Hussam Ayloush has suggested that the US is “partly responsible” for the San Bernardino terrorist attacks.

Stay updated with the latest news!

Subscribe to The Jerusalem Post Newsletter

Subscribe Now
 
Following the attacks in 2015, Ayloush suggested that the US was “partly responsible” for the ISIS-led attack on innocents in California.
“Let’s not forget that some of our own foreign policy – as Americans, as the West – has fueled that extremism,” he added.
Ayloush has in the past described US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a campaign to instill “fear of the Muslims.”
The revelation of Omar’s upcoming address comes after a major Twitter storm in which she accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) of paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.
Omar received heavy backlash for the comments and was accused of antisemitism, with leaders on both the Right and Left condemning her remarks.
Just a few days later, she was also caught up in a controversy over whether or not she would be speaking alongside an official known for his antisemitic comments at an emergency gala dinner for Yemen on February 23 in Tampa, Florida.
It was revealed that she would give the keynote address at an Islamic Relief USA dinner alongside Yousef Abdallah, who has advocated for violence against Jews and expressed antisemitic sentiments on his social media pages. Omar's PR team pushed back and the event’s marketing materials and online invitations were changed. 
They claimed that it was a clerical error and that she was never set to speak alongside Abdallah in the first place.


Related Tags
terror funding
CAIR