On September 15, 2026, the San Diego City Council adopted a working definition of “Islamophobia” and asked that it be sent to every city department, including the police. The vote was 8 to 0. The definition was drafted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. Federal prosecutors named CAIR, though they never charged it, as a coconspirator in a Hamas-financing case, and the governors of Texas and Florida have designated it a terrorist organization. The resolution does not say who wrote it. This is the story of how CAIR’s text became San Diego’s policy, drawn from nearly 2,000 pages of city records obtained by the Middle East Forum.
I have good news. I am happy to support the resolution you proposed as sent to me.
The city had every reason to act. On May 18, 2026, two teenagers attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego and murdered three men: a security guard, Amin Abdullah, and two congregants, Nadir Awad and Mansour Kaziha. About 140 students were on the campus. The city’s staff report, the memo that goes to the council with a measure, says the three men kept the attacker from reaching the school. A prosecutor later said the killers had planned to attack “a Jewish temple and African American students at a public high school” next. Afterward, according to a survey the resolution cites, 88 percent of Muslims surveyed in San Diego County felt less safe. San Diego owed its Muslim residents an answer. The records show who wrote it.
The proof of authorship is on the city’s own website. Among the September papers of the city’s Human Relations Commission, the advisory body that reviews such measures, is a four-page draft of the resolution. The file’s properties record who created it and when: Ilias Benbatoul, July 16, 2026. Benbatoul is a community canvasser in CAIR’s San Diego office. Posted beside the draft is a letter from the office’s executive director, Tazheen Nizam. Under “Authors” it reads: “A collaborative effort with assistance [and] support from many experts led by Ilias Benbatoul and Tazheen Nizam.”
Compare CAIR’s draft with the resolution the council passed two months later. The council’s definition of “Islamophobia” is the sentence CAIR wrote, with three words added: “or their property.” CAIR’s draft listed twelve examples of “Islamophobia.” The council adopted the first ten, in the same order, with light edits.
At least one council member knew whose proposal it was. Thirteen days before the vote, Councilmember Jennifer Campbell wrote to Benbatoul: “I have good news. I am happy to support the resolution you proposed as sent to me.” She signed it, “Your sister and fellow American, DrJen.” At the council meeting Benbatoul was introduced, from the table where council staff sit, as one of the “community members” presenting the measure. The staff report credits “San Diego Muslim community organizations” and names none.
The authorship matters for three reasons. The first is what the document does. Many resolutions are drafted by the groups that ask for them, and most do no more than honor a person or mark an occasion. This one defines a form of bigotry, and the council asked that it be sent to the police. The day after the vote, Nizam said on public radio what she expects of it: “Law enforcement now has a framework.” The second reason is who wrote it. Two governors have designated CAIR a terrorist organization. CAIR’s text is now the city’s reference for recognizing hatred of Muslims, and a person who repeats what those governors have said about CAIR cannot tell from that text on which side of its line he falls. The third reason is that the public was not told. Six months earlier the same council adopted a definition of antisemitism and put its author’s name in the title. This time it named no author, and the commission that had voted on the first definition never voted on the second.
How CAIR’s draft became city policy is recorded in 1,956 pages of city emails that the Forum obtained under California’s public records law. They come from two council offices. The measure’s sponsors, Council President Joe LaCava and Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera, have yet to release their own files, as have the mayor and six other city offices. What has been released shows that the definition was not the first thing CAIR wrote for San Diego. Over almost five years its local office drafted city proclamations. City staff sent drafts back to CAIR for its edits and set out the city’s podium for CAIR’s speakers. People who objected got no reply that appears in the released pages. No law need have been broken in any of this. What the records document is a city that let an outside organization write its words and did not tell the public.
Who CAIR is
CAIR was founded in 1994 by officers of the Islamic Association for Palestine, a group the U.S. government has described as part of Hamas’s propaganda apparatus. In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the Hamas-financing case, the Justice Department named CAIR as a coconspirator without charging it. In 2009 the trial judge found “ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.” An appeals court later called the listing “an untested allegation.” In 2008 the FBI adopted a policy restricting its contacts with CAIR outside of investigations.
On November 24, 2023, CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, told a convention in Chicago that “I was happy to see people breaking the siege” on October 7. The White House condemned the remark. Awad said it had been taken out of context and that he had condemned the attacks on Israeli civilians.
Texas’s governor designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization in November 2025, and Florida’s governor followed by executive order that December. CAIR sued over both. A federal judge blocked Florida’s order in March 2026 on free-speech grounds. On September 29, two weeks after San Diego’s vote, Florida’s governor and cabinet designated CAIR again under a new state law, and CAIR is challenging that in court as well. The federal government has never designated CAIR.
CAIR in California
CAIR San Diego is not a separate local group. It is one of four offices of CAIR California, which describes itself as CAIR’s largest and oldest chapter. The other offices are in Greater Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Sacramento Valley. The four belong to one corporation, based in Anaheim, with $18.9 million in revenue in 2024. It also receives public money. In June 2026 the Department of Health and Human Services told Governor Gavin Newsom that California had passed more than $27 million in federal refugee funds to CAIR California, and it warned of possible suspension or debarment.
The corporation faces two other inquiries. In January 2026 the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee asked the IRS to “investigate CAIR-CA and consider the revocation of tax-exempt status.” His letter singled out the San Diego office for celebrating its “institutional support ‘before, after, and during’” the UC San Diego encampment. And in June 2025 California’s Fair Political Practices Commission, the state’s political watchdog, opened an investigation of a sworn complaint that CAIR California lobbies the legislature but “has never complied with lobbyist registration or disclosure requirements under California law.” The commission has made no finding. On September 29, 2026, it told the Forum that the case was still open.
None of these is a finding of wrongdoing. The request to the IRS and the federal warning were public before the council voted. In the pages San Diego has released, no one in a council office is seen asking about either.
CAIR’s first drafts for the city
The first request in the released records is a small one. On November 22, 2021, a CAIR policy advocate sent a City Hall staffer an email marked high importance. The subject line was “CAIR Digital Proclamation Request | by Today 6pm.” CAIR wanted a city proclamation for its annual banquet. The proclamation was to honor CAIR, and CAIR supplied the words. Its draft said CAIR “has helped the US become a more fair and just society.” The staffer answered in eight minutes. The next morning he sent the scan: “Here you go!” The scan is not in the released pages, so the record does not show whether the city used CAIR’s words. No one in the released emails questions the request.
The following March the subject was Ramadan. Nizam sent Elo-Rivera’s office a file named “Ramadan Resolution 2022.docx.” “I tweaked last year’s proclamation just a bit,” she wrote. “Please excuse any mistakes. I do not have a policy person at the state level to proofread my work.” The April 5 agenda carried the proclamation in the names of four council members. A week later the city held a Ramadan ceremony at City Hall. “We will provide the podium and audio equipment,” Elo-Rivera’s communications director confirmed. Nizam was listed to speak first and a CAIR board member second, ahead of four council members. She had one more question: “Did you have any luck with the press?”
The day after the ceremony a warning arrived. WeCAIR, a coalition of former CAIR employees, board members, and community members, sent a nine-page letter to Elo-Rivera’s office and, that evening, to Campbell. It alleged “a culture in which sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and retaliation against those who raise concerns about such conduct is widespread.” It concluded: “Until it does that, CAIR is not a suitable partner on civil rights.” Those are allegations, not findings. The released pages show no reply to the letter and no discussion of it. Thirteen days later Nizam asked for a video of Elo-Rivera, then the council president, for CAIR to “send it everywhere.” His office assigned one staffer to write the talking points and another to shoot it.
That summer the city sent CAIR’s draft of another proclamation back to CAIR for approval. “Can you please have a look and let me know if you would like to suggest any changes?” Elo-Rivera’s communications director asked. Nizam did. Her edits, she wrote, were “to stay with statewide branding of this.” Inside two hours the city’s draft came back carrying CAIR California’s name for the occasion, “American Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month.” It went to the council on August 2.
By 2023 the city offered no draft of its own. “Is it ok that we use the same language as last year and we just change the date to 2023?” the same aide asked a CAIR staffer that July. The answer: “Yes, just the date needs to be updated.” The proclamation the council and the mayor signed does not mention CAIR. CAIR California’s annual report for that year does mention San Diego. It lists the city among those it “successfully lobbied” to recognize the month.
After October 7
On October 10, 2023, three days after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Nizam wrote to Campbell “to express my deep disappointment” in California officials whose statements showed “solidarity and concern only for Israel.” She called Gaza “the largest open-air prison” and Israel “an apartheid state.” The letter does not contain the word Hamas. It does not mention October 7, the hostages, or the Israeli dead. Campbell’s staff passed it to her chief of staff with an instruction: “For your cyber documentation.” Asked for this article whether the office had replied, it said the councilmember “does not like to get involved in foreign affairs as that is not within the City Council’s purview.”
Foreign affairs came to the council anyway. In February 2024 the city offered CAIR the Ramadan proclamation without being asked. CAIR declined. On April 3 it sent council members a letter in the name of eight organizations: “we cannot, in good conscience, support the issuance of a Ramadan proclamation if it does not include a demand for a ceasefire in Palestine.” San Diego’s council wrote no ceasefire demand. It issued no Ramadan proclamation that year or the next, which was the alternative the letter had named. “I don’t think we will respond,” Campbell’s chief of staff wrote. The proclamation returned in March 2026. Campbell’s office told this author that “Councilmember Campbell has supported that proclamation.”
The April 3 letter named CAIR San Diego and seven other organizations. Two of them were the Palestinian Youth Movement, which in a statement quoted in a 2025 letter from Senator Tom Cotton to the IRS called October 7 “an unprecedented liberation struggle,” and the Muslim American Society, which a Justice Department brief says “was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” The episode did not end the relationship. Five of the seven are on CAIR’s own list of organizations “contacted for input” on the 2026 definition, the Muslim American Society among them. The Palestinian Youth Movement is not.
Then the public wrote. In the winter of 2025 and 2026, 402 people sent 415 emails demanding that San Diego County stop funding CAIR. All but one copied the mayor and all nine council members. County records show six grants to CAIR California since 2022, totaling $55,413. Two of them paid for CAIR’s annual banquet. The released city records show no reply to any of the emails.
From CAIR’s Draft to the Council’s Vote
San Diego had adopted an outside group’s definition before, and that time it named the group. On March 17, 2026, the council adopted the definition of antisemitism written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA. The resolution carries IHRA’s name in its title, and the Human Relations Commission had voted on the definition nearly 10 months before the council did. Elo-Rivera cast the only vote against it.
Two months later came the murders at the Islamic Center. CAIR’s draft resolution, the file on the city’s website that lists Benbatoul as its author, was created on July 16, 2026. The council voted on September 15. In the 61 days between, the draft reached the city attorney’s office and the council president’s office, and CAIR met with two more council offices. It never reached a vote of the Human Relations Commission. CAIR’s letter to the commission calls the drafting “a painstaking months long process” and lists whom CAIR approached along the way: 12 organizations, eight council members or their staffs, and three officials to whom it presented the resolution, the city attorney and the district attorney among them.
By August 19, the city attorney’s office had a draft of its own, prepared for LaCava’s office. The lawyers added clauses. They called the definition “non-legally binding,” added a line protecting free speech, and asked that the definition go to every city department, including the police, “as an educational resource.” The same clauses, almost word for word, are in the March resolution on antisemitism, drafted by the same city lawyer. The lawyers also trimmed a promise. CAIR’s draft committed the city to “continued investment in the physical security of houses of worship.” The adopted text says the city “supports the physical security of houses of worship.” And they moved one sentence. CAIR’s twelfth example set a test for government itself: official actions or policies that burden Muslims disproportionately, without a legitimate justification, may be “Islamophobia.” That sentence came out of the definition and went, almost word for word, into the resolution’s background section. The released records do not say who decided that, or why. What remained was CAIR’s, lightly edited.
On August 26 and 27 Benbatoul met with the office of Councilmember Raul Campillo and with Campbell. The city attorney’s draft was a week old. What CAIR took from the meetings, by its own thank-you notes, was support: Benbatoul thanked each office for the councilmember’s “willingness to support the upcoming Anti-Muslim Hate Resolution.”
Campbell’s senior policy adviser, Manuel Reyes, attended her meeting and answered this author’s questions about it. CAIR, he wrote, “reached out to our office and other offices and requested to meet to discuss the working definition on islamophobia.” The meeting “went super well.” Did the councilmember know who had written the text she agreed to support? It was, Reyes wrote, his and the councilmember’s “understanding that CAIR worked alongside Council President LaCava and Councilmember Elo Rivera on this resolution.” He added that Campbell “takes this issue of islamophobia and hate very seriously as it is personal to her.” Members of her family are Muslim, he wrote, and the Islamic Center is in her district. She “denounces all forms of hate including islamophobia.”
LaCava’s office approved the measure on August 28, the city’s approval log shows. The city attorney’s office approved it on September 1. The Human Relations Commission was to take it up on September 9. The city’s notice says the meeting “is hereby Cancelled for September 9, 2026, due to lack of quorum.” LaCava, who sponsored the measure with Elo-Rivera, told his colleagues why it had come straight to them: “As Council President, I believe this was important to be direct docketed and provide the entire council the opportunity to participate.” Direct docketing sends a measure straight to the full council. The commission got no such opportunity. One commissioner, Nicole Murray-Ramirez, who supports adopting a definition, wrote to the council: “We cannot demand that one community be consulted and heard while failing to provide the same opportunity to another.” KPBS reported that Jewish faith leaders had not been consulted.
In the two weeks before the vote, 47 people sent the council 55 emails against the resolution. “Islamophobia Resolution – Beware of CAIR,” one subject line read. The released records show no reply to any of them. Eight organizations wrote in support, and Campbell’s staff forwarded five of their letters to the policy adviser who had met with CAIR. Of the 55 emails opposed, the released records show none forwarded to him. The day before the vote, an aide to Elo-Rivera sent CAIR’s press advisory to the staffs of other council offices: “Please feel free to share with your networks.”
The papers before the council on September 15 did not name the author. The resolution says the city attorney relied on “information provided by affected third parties.” The March resolution carries the same line, and there the third party is named in the title. The staff report, signed by the sponsors’ chiefs of staff, describes its outreach in one line: “Collaborated with San Diego Muslim community organizations.” More than half of that report, 508 of its 939 words, repeats CAIR’s draft word for word. The slides prepared for the hearing make an appeal under the heading “OUR ASK”: “Support and vote YES on the anti-Muslim hate resolution.” They list among their sources CAIR’s “Advocacy Meeting Agenda + Talking Points.”
At the meeting the city clerk reported the count from the city’s online comment form: “65 comments, 64 comments in favor, and one comment in opposition.” That count did not include the emails. Campbell’s office says its administrative assistant keeps a tally of mail “in favor and opposed to all items including this resolution” and shares it with the councilmember. As council records indicate, the vote was 8 to 0, with one member, Marni von Wilper, absent.
The next day Nizam went on KPBS, the public radio station, and said what she expects of the definition. “Law enforcement now has a framework,” she said. “When somebody’s called a terrorist out in a public event or out on the streets, this framework provides what is and is not to be defined as Islamophobia.” The IHRA definition, she said, “would constrict the community’s ability to criticize a government which is conducting a genocide.” Her own “was definitely not an invasion of anyone’s First Amendment rights.” The two resolutions carry the same free-speech clause, word for word.
The pages that hold no reply to CAIR’s critics show how fast City Hall answered CAIR. The banquet request of 2021 got its answer in eight minutes. Nizam’s edits of 2022 came back in a new city draft inside two hours. When Benbatoul asked in 2026 to meet Campbell, her chief of staff replied the next day.
What the City Has Not Said
Mayor Todd Gloria signed the resolution on September 28. In May, Nizam had said of the mayor and law enforcement, “They have turned their backs on us.” On the day of the vote the mayor issued a statement: “Just as we must speak clearly against antisemitism, we must speak clearly against Islamophobia and every form of hate that seeks to divide our communities.” Did he know who had drafted the definition? His office told this author that it “was aware of questions regarding the development of the definition prior to the Sept. 15 City Council action” and that the mayor “issued his statement following the Council’s unanimous adoption of the resolution.” Asked whether the definition has gone to the police, it said such questions “should be directed to those departments.” Asked whether the mayor had met with CAIR San Diego since May, it said he “has continued engaging with members of San Diego’s Muslim community.” It did not say whether he had met with CAIR.
Every official in this story can say that no law was broken, and that advocacy groups hand cities their words all the time. Both statements are true. Neither answers what the records show: the city put its name to CAIR’s text, asked that it be sent to the police, and did not tell the public whose text it was. CAIR’s authorship was there for anyone who opened the commission’s file. The resolution and the staff report did not state it.
This is how CAIR exercises power at the local level. It does not need to win an election. It needs an aide who will send its draft back for approval and a council president who will send its text straight to a vote. It had both in San Diego.
What San Diego Should Do
Three steps would repair this. First, any resolution or proclamation drafted in whole or in large part by an outside organization should say so on its face, as the March resolution names IHRA. Second, the definition should go back to the Human Relations Commission for the hearing it never had, with Jewish, LGBT, and reformist Muslim organizations at the table, and it should not go to the police until then. Third, before any official takes another meeting with CAIR California, the city should ask it what the Ways and Means chairman, the Department of Health and Human Services, and hundreds of members of the public have already asked. It should publish the answers.
The records say who wrote the definition. They do not say the rest. These officials can.
- To the city attorney: CAIR says it presented its resolution to your office. Who decided what to keep, and who moved its twelfth example out of the definition?
- To Council President LaCava: Your office approved the measure 12 days before the commission was to meet. Why was it “important to be direct docketed”?
- To Councilmember Campbell: You wrote that you were happy to support “the resolution you proposed as sent to me.” Did you tell your colleagues, or the public, whose resolution it was?
- To Councilmember Elo-Rivera: Your office forwarded CAIR’s proposed language for the families of the dead. Does anyone there edit what CAIR writes before the city says it?
- To Mayor Gloria: Your office referred the question to the departments. Has the definition gone to the police, and what are officers told to do with it?
The last email
CAIR has said what it expects next. The day after the vote, Benbatoul thanked two council offices in identical words. CAIR, he wrote, looked forward to “using this resolution as a building block for continued collaboration and partnership.”
The next request came a day later. Benbatoul sent Elo-Rivera’s office a document under the subject line “Recognition for ICSD Family of Martyrs.” ICSD is the Islamic Center. “Please see the attached document with the language proposed for the recognition,” he wrote. Four months after the murders, CAIR was proposing the city’s words for the families of the dead. Elo-Rivera’s office passed the document to the council president’s staff, along with CAIR’s photographs of the vote.
The reply is the last email in the records San Diego has released. “These are great, thanks!” it says. It is about the photographs. About the words CAIR wrote for the city to say to the families of three murdered men, it says nothing.
CAIR San Diego and the offices of Council President LaCava and Councilmember Campillo did not respond to requests for comment sent on September 30 with a deadline of October 1. Councilmember Elo-Rivera’s office replied after the deadline that it was finalizing its answers and asked to send them the next day; none had arrived when this article was published. The offices of Councilmember Campbell and Mayor Gloria responded, and their answers are reported above. This article will be updated if others respond.
About the records
The Forum filed its California Public Records Act request (PRA 26-9753) on September 19, 2026, for the city’s contracts, payments, proclamations, resolutions, and correspondence involving CAIR California and its offices since January 1, 2019. Council District 2, Campbell’s office, released 1,880 pages on September 22: 697 email messages dated from October 2021 to September 17, 2026, chiefly the correspondence of Campbell’s and Elo-Rivera’s offices, with a few messages from the council president’s office and the mass emails sent to all nine council members. Council District 7, Campillo’s office, released 76 pages, with redactions, on September 29. The City Clerk released the agenda material for the September 15 measure and the signed resolution on September 30. The other offices assigned the request have released nothing; the city said on October 1 that it was still reviewing records and expected to give an update by October 22. Statements here about what the records do not show apply to the 1,956 pages released. The drafts, resolutions, staff report, approval log, hearing slides, and commission notice cited are on the city’s website and are linked in the text; the copy of the IHRA resolution linked is the city’s file as posted by the Combat Antisemitism Movement. The copy of CAIR’s draft on the city’s website was last saved on September 4, within two minutes of the letter posted beside it. The comparison of the staff report with CAIR’s draft counts the words in passages of nine or more consecutive words that appear in both. The Fair Political Practices Commission’s complaint file and case-opening letter were released to the Forum on September 29, 2026, under a separate request.
