The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with Hamas links, recently announced in its newsletter that the executive-director of its Tampa chapter has been given a Humanitarian Service Award by the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lakeland.
A top CAIR official is a peculiar choice for a Humanitarian Service Award. A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo lists CAIR’s predecessor, the Islamic Association for Palestine, as one of its fronts. The memo decribes its “work in America…as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
This objective would be completed by with the assistance of “their hands,” meaning the American population. Brotherhood operatives were told to “possess a mastery of the art of ‘coalitions.’” CAIR’s predecessor, the Islamic Association for Palestine, is listed as a Brotherhood front in this memo.
In 2007, the U.S. Justice Department labeled CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. The government stated that CAIR is an “entity” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee; a secret body set up to influence public opinion and especially the media. The FBI subsequently ended its use of CAIR as an outreach partner.
That same year, federal prosecutors had this to say about CAIR in a court filing:
“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.”
Not only is the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lakeland honoring the work of CAIR—it’s specifically honoring Hassan Shibly, the leader of its Tampa chapter.
His focus of late has been disparaging the FBI for the death of Ibragim Todashev, a close associate of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Todashev attacked FBI agents who then shot and killed him after he confessed to killing three Jewish students in 2011 with Tsarnaev.
From the beginning, Shibly and CAIR have painted Todashev as an innocent victim who was murdered by the FBI. Shibly insinuates that Todashev was set up by the U.S. government, commenting that “Dead men can’t tell tales.”
The Justice Department and Florida State Attorney Jeff Attorney each investigated the incident and came to the same conclusion: There was no foul play and the FBI agent that shot Todashev would not be charged.
Todashev wrote the confession and then injured the FBI agent by tossing the coffee table at him. He was shot when he grabbed a broom stick’s metal handle and prepared to strike the injured FBI agent. After being shot a few times, Todashev again disobeyed commands and moved aggressively towards the agent and was shot again.
Shibly’s documented history includes defending Hezbollah as a “resistance” group, refusing to condemn a Hamas ad praising Islamist preachers and Neturei Karta, a Jewish extremist group that defended Iranian President Ahmadinejad and supports the destruction of the state of Israel.
He has also pushed 9/11 conspiracy theories and has suggested that the U.S. and British governments were staging terrorist attacks and sectarian violence in Iraq. He gave a carefully worded statement in 2010 that justified attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and repeatedly posted anti-American propaganda on Facebook. For example, he twice posted a video depicting the U.S. military as terrorists.
In 2004, Shibly and four Muslims with him were detained by the authorities at the Canadian border after attending an Islamist conference. He sued the Department of Homeland Security but it was dismissed.
The U.S. government said the detention and interviewing was done because it had “credible intelligence that conferences similar to the one from which these individuals were leaving were being used by terrorist organizations to fundraise and to hide the travel of terrorists themselves.”
The Unitarian Church in the U.S. has been a frequent ally of CAIR, helping the group to “possess a mastery of the art of ‘coalitions,’” as the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memo put it.
Last summer, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles teamed up with CAIR to sue the National Security Agency, reciting exaggerated claims about the NSA’s conduct. This was just another entry in CAIR’s pattern of framing the U.S. government as an oppressive force with malicious intent towards innocent Muslims.
The Unitarian Universalist Fund for Social Responsibility sponsored a CAIR event about “Islamophobia” at the All Souls Unitarian Church in New London, Connecticut, last year. For CAIR and its allies, “Islamophobia” is a political weapon to accuse critics of being anti-Muslim bigots.
The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUAC) is also an official interfaith partner of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), CAIR’s fellow unindicted co-conspirator and U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. ISNA’s leadership is full of Islamists.
The UUAC also is a member of Shoulder-to-Shoulder interfaith coalition that is allied to ISNA. It also belongs to Religious for Peace USA, another coalition with very strong Islamist representation.
All of this information about CAIR and Shibly is publicly available and easily findable through a simple Google search. Either the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lakeland did not vet Shibly and CAIR at all, or it has no concern about Islamist extremism.
