It's Radical Islam, Stupid

This is one of the finest pieces I've seen yet on just how CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) came to be and how this terrorist front group has been given a free pass in America - the full article is here at The Investigative Project on Terrorism. I strongly suggest you read the whole thing but I have excerpted below some of the paragraphs I found the most telling.

The MSM will not shine the light of truth on CAIR so little peon blogs like mine are tasked with it - who knows, one day it might just come out how our representatives in Washington, D.C. were duped by CAIR or more significantly, were complicit in aiding and abetting a terrorist organization.

Look at what has been going on right under our noses.

It's Radical Islam, Stupid

In 1993, a secret meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood Palestine Committee—mostly senior Hamas leaders--was held in a Philadelphia Marriott. The group discussed new ways to secretly funnel money to Hamas and of creating a new public relations organization to deceive the American about their true objectives of helping Hamas.
Less than a year later, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) was created to serve as a front group for Hamas. Since that time, it has morphed into a quasi legitimate "Islamic civil rights" group portrayed in some circles as the equivalent of the NAACP. For 14 years, CAIR got away with the lying to us about who they are, justifying Islamic terrorist attacks, legitimizing suicide bombings, presenting speakers who had been Holocaust deniers, making incendiary presentations about the United States and urging Muslims not to talk to the FBI. CAIR claims that that there is no such thing as radical Islam, but rather a secret cabal to attack all of Islam, while secretly receiving millions of dollars from Saudi financiers and attacking terrorist prosecutions as somehow an "attack on Islam."

Last week, a new book, Muslim Mafia, disclosed or elaborated on many of these developments within CAIR. Four Congressmen, led by Sue Myrick, (R-N.C), held a press conference to protest the fact that CAIR, a Hamas front group, had a plan to insert interns into key congressional committees. The book made plenty of other disclosures that were highlighted by the Congressman.
And what happened? Those other points were discarded by the media, which picked up CAIR's dissembling spin that the Congressmen advocated a witch hunt against all Muslim staffers on Capitol Hill. They said no such thing.
CNN never challenged any of the demonstrably false statements made by a CAIR official it interviewed. The news website Politico whitewashed CAIR. Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution called CAIR a "mainstream" group unfairly targeted by right wing wackos. Congressmen John Conyers and Loretta Sanchez, who had done CAIR's bidding for years, were among those who leapt to CAIR's defense. They all bought into CAIR's manifestly ludicrous claim that attacking CAIR was somehow tantamount to attacking all of Islam.
That has been CAIR's modus operandi since its inception.

Much of the damning information about CAIR came out well before the book, primarily through evidence in the HLF trial. And yet earlier this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered that CAIR officials be included in conference calls about the Middle East; the State Department even dispatched key CAIR officials—some of whom have made blatantly racist statements claiming that the reports of the Darfur genocide was actually part of a "Zionist" conspiracy—on official US diplomatic missions. The Department of Homeland Security, despite being briefed that CAIR was a front group for a terrorist organization, had official meetings with CAIR. And it appointed recently as a senior advisor to DHS a member of an organization that believes that Hizballah is a good group that should not be classified as terrorist.
And in the last few years, National Public Radio (NPR), the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Detroit News—to pick at random from the media--have become a cheerleading squads for CAIR, interviewing CAIR officials as if they were no different that Rotary Club officials while suppressing any negative information about CAIR. For the mainstream media, it seems, the government is more of an evil force than Hamas. The New York Times' public editor even made the startling admission last year that it did not call Hamas a terrorist group, "though it sponsors acts of terror against Israel."

The Goldstone report effectively took all of the propaganda put out by Hamas—much of it demonstrably false—and presented it as a fact. If applied to the United States, the report would have branded every soldier and every officer in the Iraq and Afghanistan war a "war criminal." The fact that the Goldstone report has gotten this far is attributable to one thing only: the existence of a powerful Islamic lobby at the United Nations.
In yet another example of the inverted focus when it comes to radical Islam, Random House, Yale University Press, and now a German publisher, won't publish books that are "critical" of, or potentially offensive to, Muslim extremists. Even the much celebrated journalist Fareed Zakaria of CNN and Newsweek showed his true profile in cowardice when he advised Yale University Press not to include images of the Prophet Muhammed in a book about the controversy stirred by the 2005 publication of the Danish cartoons.
There's been a lot of talk lately about balanced reporting. These examples show how easily terrorists and their sympathizers receive more than the benefit of the doubt in the public debate. They get outright support from supposedly neutral third party observers and license to continue their deceit and treachery.
The mind boggles.