The Council on American-Islamic Relations released an online video Wednesday urging Americans to “spread love, not Islamophobia,” and featuring a dig at Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.
The short video begins with a young Muslim woman who says, “Don’t let the hate get you down, because there is much more love in the world.”
An excerpt from a letter sent to CAIR by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, reads, “Our nation was founded on a single, aspirational principle: ‘equal justice under law.’”
Next comes an audio clip of a phone call CAIR says it received from an American, rejecting anti-Muslim rhetoric spread by Trump and other public figures.
“I’m an Irish Catholic and my ancestors met horrific prejudice,” a woman’s voice says. “And I’m appalled at what Trump and others in the media are doing to fabulous Muslim Americans.”
A blurb then reads: “Take a stand to say: We as Americans need to come together and denounce such hateful speech. Spread love, not Islamophobia.”
Viewers are invited to download the “Spread Love, Not Islamophobia” image from CAIR’s website and to share it on social media.
CAIR said it “produced the video as part of a larger response to an unprecedented rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate crimes following the Paris terrors attacks, the San Bernardino shootings and the Islamophobic statements of public figures like Donald Trump and Ben Carson.”
Trump caused a stir last month with a call for foreign Muslims to be temporarily banned from entering the U.S., following the Dec. 2 terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., perpetrated by the U.S.-born son of Pakistani migrants and his Pakistani-born wife, both evidently inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist group.
CAIR, which styles itself the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, has been dogged by controversy in past years. It regularly labels its critics “Islamophobes.”
CAIR was named by the Justice Department in 2007 as “unindicted co-conspirators” in its case against the Holy Land Foundation in Texas, whose leaders were convicted the following year of raising money for Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization. One of the convicted men, CAIR’s Texas branch founder Ghassan Elashi, was sentenced to 65 years’ imprisonment.
CAIR argues that the “unindicted co-conspirators” label holds no legal weight “since it does not require the Justice Department to prove anything in a court of law.” It says Elashi was “once briefly associated with one of our more than 30 regional chapters.”