CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad apparently will imitate House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s undermining of America’s foreign policy. Friday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contains an interview of Awad entitled U.S. Islamic group seeks peace in Iraq where he is quoted as saying:
“Leaders in our community, led by CAIR, are working on a peace initiative that we hope to bring to the scene soon… We have some specific proposals and specific ideas that we believe, if implemented, will help both the United States and Iraq to get out of the crisis. I cannot disclose a lot about it, but we’re calling it (the) American Muslim Peace Initiative [all emphasis added mine].
“We want people not to lose hope in the future relationship between America and the Muslim world because of what they see in terms of deteriorating situations, whether in Iraq or other places, or even because of the rise of Islamophobia and the increased number of (incidents) of discrimination and hate crimes. We want people to look forward to a future that can be shaped now. And this task cannot be done alone. We need and we look for partners in this society to work with us.
“We should be willing, all of us, to think out of the box and also to have the courage to reassess and evaluate what went wrong with the pre-Iraq war, and the hype and the propaganda, and the allegations, beyond some historical stereotypes and misunderstandings… The second thing is, the American Muslim community has to be engaged and has to be seen as a partner in this process… Out of the 7 million American Muslims, the majority are well-educated and resourceful. And American Muslims have great credibility and legitimacy in the Muslim world. We can explain Islam and the Muslim world to Americans, and also we can explain America and its issues to the Muslim world.”
CAIR now intends to meddle with the Bush administration’s efforts in Iraq. Mr. Awad is confused for our Constitution vests the conduct of foreign policy in the Executive branch of our government, not the Executive Director of CAIR. He implies our invasion of Iraq could have been avoided had Islamophobia not caused the administration to “hype” the threat Saddam Hussein’s regime posed and the WMD intelligence. Mr. Awad blends his usual phony portrayal of all Muslims as victims with the Democrat Party’s current anti-war rhetoric.
CAIR wants to “explain Islam and the Muslim world to Americans,” presumably to avoid such misunderstandings and invasions in the future. It can also fix America’s image by explaining “America and its issues to the Muslim world.” Thanks but no thanks.
On the home front, while their membership is but a small fraction of America’s Muslim community, CAIR has long claimed to speak for all of them. We have only Mr. Awad’s word for it that organized attacks and wholesale discrimination are taking place. It is true that the reported hate crimes against Muslims here have risen over the last decade. All hate crimes are wrong, criminal, and should be condemned yet the number of crimes committed against Muslims remains relatively small and all have been conducted by individuals acting maliciously on their own.
CAIR continues to express anti-Israel and anti-Zionism rhetoric that sounds a lot like anti-Jew. They often attempt to justify this by allying with Jews willing to also condemn Israel. Yet CAIR has never directly denounced the terrorist attacks conducted by Hamas and Hezbollah, choosing instead to issue one lame condemnation of terrorism in general after another.
CAIR has no moral or legal authority to speak on behalf of the American government. Mr. Awad needs to put his own organization’s house in order; it speaks only for itself, for few in America’s Muslim community, and has a hatred problem of it’s own to fix.