by Joe Kaufman, FrontPageMagazine, May 19, 2008

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was founded, in June of 1994, as part of a Hamas-related quad of groups known as the Palestine Committee. Since then, CAIR has lost a number of its representatives due to terrorist activity, and it has been named by the U.S. government as a co-conspirator for a Hamas financing trial. Yet, of the four groups in the committee, CAIR is the only one that still remains in existence, leading to the question: If terrorism won’t bring down CAIR, what will? The answer may very well be in its status as an American organization – its non-profit tax status.

United States Representative and co-founder of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, Sue Myrick, is one of a growing number of lawmakers to speak out against CAIR. As reported in World Net Daily, in December 2007, she stated, “Groups like CAIR have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the United States.”

Recently, Representative Myrick released a personal ten-point agenda, entitled ‘Wake Up America,’ put out, according to her office, “to alert and educate Americans to terrorist threats here at home posed by radical Islamic extremists.” Point number four in the agenda states, “Will call for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) 501(c)(3) non-profit status which restricts ‘lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.’”

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which owns CAIR’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, in May 2006, approved a multi-million dollar endowment to CAIR. This was just months after the U.S. Congress, worried about a potential terrorist threat from UAE, acted to stop a deal that would allow a UAE company to run American seaports. As reported by investigative journalist Paul Sperry, the endowment to CAIR was worth nearly $75 million, two-thirds of which allotted towards a “public-relations campaign aimed at repairing Islam’s – and the UAE’s – image in America.”

An investigation, such as the one Representative Myrick suggests, could prove that CAIR’s financial dealings with UAE have been more than just goodwill gestures and could potentially do harm to CAIR’s designation as a 501(c)(3). However, there is another avenue with regard to CAIR’s tax status that needs to be looked into, and that is the possible violation of how both it and its subsidiary, CAIR-Chicago, have used their 501(c)(3)s to advocate for and speak out against political candidates.

In January of this year, CAIR National launched a political-based website for the 2008 elections that would, according to CAIR, provide its web viewers “the latest news and opinions relating to Muslims and election races nationwide.” Some of the opinions posted to this site have put into question CAIR’s status as a non-profit institution. (Continue Reading this Article)