The board president of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Zead Ramadan, has announced his candidacy for District 7 City Council and has already raised $47,000. He is a Palestinian that was born in Kuwait but came to the U.S. as a child. In December 2011, he refused to answer a question about whether he’d condemn Hamas.
In May 2012, Ramadan appeared on Iran’s state-controlled PressTV and said “the comments that are being made against [American] Muslims are very eerily echoing the comments that were being made against Jews by Nazis.” Another quote shed some light on why the Iranian regime booked him:
"[W]henever you think that America, the land of the free, is going to grow up and go beyond it [racism], more intolerant, extremist voices come out.”
CAIR was labeled an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history in 2007. The government listed CAIR among entities that “who and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee and/or its organizations.” The Palestine Committee was a secret Brotherhood group set up to support Hamas. In 2009, a federal judge upheld the labeling of CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator because of “ample” evidence tying it to Hamas.
In a 2007 court filing in the case of convicted terrorist Sabri Bekhala, federal prosecutors state: “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists…the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”
CAIR was founded by members of the pro-Hamas Islamic Association for Palestine. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo identifies IAP as one of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The memo explicitly states that its “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
Ramadan served alongside Cyrus McGoldrick, the CAIR-NY leader, who left the organization on January 7. As we reported in December, McGoldrick sent out a flurry pro-Hamas tweets during the latest round of fighting with Israel. But not a word of condemnation was heard by Ramadan.
Here is a sampling of McGoldrick’s tweets:
- November 15: “Palestine is a land occupied by foreign settlers. They have the right to resist, to defend themselves ‘by any means necessary.’ ”
- November 16: “Sign of the times: bloodthirsty Zionists trend #HAMASbumperstickers, then erupt when I acknowledge Palestinian right to resist occupation.”
- November 29: “Meshal: Anyone who is bothered by our rockets is welcome to provide us with accurate weapons to fight the enemy.” (a retweet from Hamas leader Khaled Meshal).
- November 29: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Insha’Allah.” (A support of the elimination of the state of Israel.
McGoldrick also sent out tweets supporting Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, when he faced protests over his power grab. McGoldrick suggested that the protesters were puppets of the “old pro-West/Mubarak/Israel crowd.”
The voters of New York should require Ramadan to explain why he wouldn’t condemn Hamas, and why he feels comfortable working for CAIR, especially alongside McGoldrick.
