CAIR Leader Edits Tweet On Sami Al-Arian For His Western Readers

Nihad Awad, the leader of the US-based Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), has posted back-to-back Tweets, one in Arabic language blaming the “Israeli Lobby” for the prosecution of convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian and one in English omitting the phrase. In his Arabic language version, Mr. Awad writes:

while his Englishversion reads: This is one of the most egregious example seen to date by the GMBDW of a Global Muslim Brotherhood leader writing onbe thing for Western audiences and another for Arabic readers. (Mr. Awad’s tweets are also somewhat misleading as the charges referred to were in reference to the criminal contempt case against Mr. Al-Arian and not his conviction for aiding a terrorist group from almost ten years ago.)

The GMBDW reported last week that the US Justice Department had dropped the long-standing criminal contempt case against convicted Al-Arian. Nihad Awad, the long time leader of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), was one of the three officers of the Islamic Association of Palestine who founded CAIR in 1994 and was present during an infamous 1993 meeting held in Philadelphia by senior leaders of Hamas, the Holy Land Foundation, and the IAP. A widely reported FBI memo based on wiretaps of the meeting indicated that its purpose was “to develop a strategy to defeat the Israeli/Palestinian peace accord, and to continue and improve their [HAMAS] fund-raising and political activities in the United States.” In 2009, a US federal judge ruled “The Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (“IAP”), and with Hamas.” CAIR and its leaders have had a long history of defending individuals accused of terrorism by the US. government, often labeling such prosecutions a “war on Islam”, and have also been associated with Islamic fundamentalism and antisemitism.