CAIR Feels the Heat
By Stephen Schwartz
There have been, and continue to be, countless charges that CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, is not what it purports to be. FSM Contributing Editor Stephen Schwartz dispels any confusion by explaining how CAIR can best be understood: in comparison to the history of totalitarian penetration of America.
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In the short term, however, both the American Stalinists and the American Wahhabis have had a common three-point agenda:
* The Communists sought to identify all progressive, labor, and social movements with themselves. They even seized upon the once-honorable term “progressive” as their own. Authentic progressive reform – originally identified with the Republican party – as well as labor unions and social protest, did not threaten the foundations of the U.S. Rather, they strengthened the integrity of our democracy and the sovereignty of our people.
* Similarly, CAIR appears to seek subordination of the whole of Sunni Islam in the U.S. to its control. The organization’s outsized ambitions are reflected in its very name – as if it has authority for all relations between the U.S. as a society and the entirety of Islam. Moderate Islam, organized and functioning as a normal religion not very different from Catholicism and Judaism, represents no menace to America. Indeed, a real American Islam based on long-established Muslim spiritual traditions would help America in its relations with the world. Such an American Islam would be comparable with the varieties of moderate Muslim devotion seen in French West Africa, in the majority of Moroccans and Algerians, in the Balkans, in the ranks of more than 20 million Russian Muslims, and in most of Turkish society, central Asia, India, and Southeast Asia – that is, among the majority of the Islamic believers on the planet. Moderate Islam, although repressed, is increasingly asserting itself even in Saudi Arabia and, among ordinary people as well as intellectuals, in Iran. Ayatollah Ali Sistani embodies moderate guidance for the Shia Muslims of Iraq, in contrast with clerical authoritarianism in Iran.
* The Communists and CAIR alike eventually made their highest priority influence with the U.S. authorities. The Stalinists of the 1930s-40s placed spies at the highest levels of American and Canadian policy-making, serving as advisers to government on labor and foreign policy. Labor was then extremely militant and viewed with fear as a force for disruption, while sympathizers of fascist regimes agitated against resistance to German and Japanese imperialism. In a striking parallel, CAIR offers itself to the U.S Departments of Justice and Homeland Security as experts on radical Islam and terrorism. And from my perspective, too many officials in both departments accept CAIR as an expert partner.
The Communists and CAIR mainly sought power over a recognized constituency. To paraphrase an observer of the time, by penetrating the U.S. Labor Department the Communists turned unions they took over into a kind of concentration camp for industrial workers. CAIR performs a comparable function in Sunni mosques, which, as witnessed by many Muslims, helps turn them into little Saudi kingdoms on American soil, filled with radical preaching and incitement.
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