Steve Emerson, founder and executive director of the project (IPT), told JNS that he will release the report, titled “CAIR’s Antisemitism Unmasked,” on June 16. It took two years to assemble the report, which JNS reviewed.
“CAIR was created as a Hamas front group and still functions as a propaganda arm of Hamas to this day,” Emerson told JNS. “Antisemitism is in the DNA of CAIR. It is part of CAIR’s intrinsic fiber.”
CAIR has been in the news of late, following the revelation that the White House brought the group in as a partner on its national strategy on combating antisemitism.
That move, history professor Gil Troy, recently told JNS, is like recruiting “male chauvinists for the next women’s rights initiative,” or inviting “some butchers to National Vegetarian Day.”
Emerson told JNS that CAIR’s participation in the White House antisemitism strategy is “one of the greatest deceptions in national security in modern times.”
The new report, which is slated to come out in paperback in two weeks, is organized thematically, corresponding to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.
Much, but not all, of the report documents extensive allegations and reporting about CAIR that is already public. One new item is an FBI agent’s affidavit, which Emerson obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. That document names Omar Ahmad, co-founder of CAIR, as “one of the leaders of Hamas.”
From the origins of CAIR, which was founded in 1994, and its closeness to Hamas to the organization today, some 30 years later, the report details many anti-Israel statements from leaders of the group. One example: Nihad Awad, CAIR co-founder and executive director, referred to Tel Aviv as “occupied” in 2021, noting “It will be free later.”
To Emerson, the report not only implicates CAIR, but also those who stand by idly, or who support the group.
“This book is as much an implicit indictment of the media and half the members of Congress who have legitimized CAIR as it is as an indictment of CAIR itself,” he told JNS. “We live in the age of citizen-warriors, but the weapons we citizens carry are knowledge. That’s what this book provides.”