The Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security dolled out $100,000 in tax dollars to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
While portraying itself as an Islamic civil liberties advocacy group, CAIR has come under intense scrutiny that has only grown since its inception. Omar Ahmad founded CAIR in 1994 shortly after meeting with the leaders of the terrorist organization Hamas. Prominent members, including executive director Nihad Awad, declared their support for Hamas.
CAIR then began fundraising prolifically for the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which was convicted of providing Hamas with millions in material support.
Following the terror financial trial, the FBI blacklisted CAIR. Despite this well-documented history, someone, it seems, made a glaring oversight.
Per the Daily Wire:
To fund CAIR, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first awarded monies to the Washington, D.C. government, which then selected CAIR and a number of other extremist organizations as suitable sub-recipients. The federal government would likely have been aware, however, that CAIR was a grantee — according to government documentation, it seems sub-grantees must be approved by DHS before funds are distributed.
The administration’s funding of CAIR was the product of the DHS’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program. As my colleague David Swindle recently wrote in The Daily Wire, Congress’ current proposed expansion of the program’s budget, however “well-meaning,” carries enormous “potential for abuse” and will end up providing “millions of taxpayer dollars” to “pro-jihadist Islamist groups.”
This program and others seem to be doing just that. Additional new federal grants of taxpayers’ money handed out to Islamist organizations include over $57,000 to the Muslim American Society (MAS), a national Islamist organization whose Philadelphia branch hosted an event last year at which young children from an MAS-run school recited poetry about the killing of Jews; and $100,000 to Dar al-Hijrah, a hardline Virginia mosque once home to former al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, and long considered a key terror hub by law enforcement agencies.
The Middle East Forum has written before about the enormous amount of taxpayers’ money being handed out to dangerous Islamist organizations. In 2019, we discovered that over $41 million of federal grants has been given to radical groups since 2007. This total does not include the dozens of more recent awards made in the last few months.
AAN Staff
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