CAIR Lies in Smear Campaign Against Zuhdi Jasser

Robert Spencer

I know, I know: reporting that the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is lying is like reporting that humans breathe oxygen. Still, this is a particularly egregious example, and it is important to set the record straight. Hamas-linked CAIR is now defaming Zuhdi Jasser, the nation’s premier (and virtually only) anti-jihad Muslim spokesman. I have had some differences with Jasser (you can see our 2011 debate here) about the nature of Islamic teaching and the necessity of reform in Islam, but there is no doubt that he is a strong voice against Hamas-linked CAIR and other malignant Islamic supremacist forces.


It is also highly likely that Hamas-linked CAIR is lying about Jasser’s supposed attempt to deny religious rights to Muslim military personnel, since Jasser is committed to constitutional freedoms. There is no doubt, in any case, that they’re lying about me. In the first place, I’ve never heard of the Abstraction Fund, which they say funds Jihad Watch. I am not familiar with all those who fund the David Horowitz Freedom Center, with which Jihad Watch is affiliated, and it is possible that Abstraction funds the Center, but they do not fund Jihad Watch directly. (They’re certainly welcome to do so!)
More importantly, Hamas-linked CAIR claims that the Roman Catholic diocese of Sacramento called me a “key leader in the anti-Islam hate movement in the United States.” This is almost certainly a lie, for several reasons. One is that in its initial chest-thumping about the Sacramento bishop caving in to their smear campaign last June, CAIR never mentioned this — and Hamas-linked CAIR has never been one to shy away from using a weapon that their marks hand them. What’s more, I spoke at the event in question, and the diocese of Sacramento had an information booth there — a strange thing for the diocese to have done if they really wanted to shun a leader of a supposed “hate movement.” The official statement that the diocese sent to Kolbe Academy said only this: “The Bishop didn’t think that it was in the best interest of Kolbe Academy to have a controversial speaker at a conference on education.”
See? This is how Hamas-linked CAIR operates: they (and their allies, such as Reza Aslan’s Aslan Media) mount a campaign of defamation against a counter-jihad speaker (and it isn’t just me — they do it to everyone who stands up against jihad terror). A busy and ill-informed official, such as the Bishop of Sacramento, sees this campaign and caves in immediately, not because he agrees with Hamas-linked CAIR’s defamation, but simply because he doesn’t want any “controversy.”
Groups like CAIR and Aslan Media know that it usually suffices just to stir up a spurious “controversy” over a counter-jihad speaker to get that speaker canceled, because big organizations (like the diocese of Sacramento) don’t want to be the focus of endless hysterical “news” stories and unwelcome media attention. Then when they cave, the anti-free speech fascists trumpet this as more evidence of the wickedness of the counter-jihad speaker, even though no judgment was actually made about the correctness of their charges at all: “See? He’s so hateful that the diocese of Sacramento wanted him dropped from a conference” — when actually the only thing that happened was that the jihad enabler kicked up a fuss where people didn’t want any fuss.
It’s an insidious tactic. Hamas-linked CAIR keeps using it because it works, and because the organizations that should be on to this as a tactic and ready to stand up for freedom and human rights are still unaware of it, and ready to cave at the first sign of “controversy.”
By the way, a couple of things the CAIR press release, which has been widely reported upon and picked up by Al Jazeera and other pro-jihad outfits, didn’t mention in connection with the diocese of Sacramento: CAIR and Aslan Media tried the same smear campaign when I debated a couple of Muslim spokesmen in Michigan a few months ago, at another Catholic conference. Not only did Earl Boyea, Bishop of Lansing, not cave, but he came to celebrate Mass at the event. Nor did CAIR bother to quote quote the National Catholic Register calling me “perhaps the foremost Catholic expert on Islam in our country,” or Catholic Insight calling me “one of the most insightful and learned scholars of Islam.” Truth doesn’t serve their agenda, doncha know. For CAIR, it never has.