California Conservative

Joe Kaufman, the chairman of Americans Against Hate and founder of CAIR Watch, has posted something on AAH’s blog to refute claims made during Ibrahim Hooper’s interview with Paula Zahn. Let’s first review Hooper’s claims:

ZAHN: But this is a warning in and of itself. No one had ever really heard of the achievement award. That was not such a big deal.
HOOPER: Yes, exactly. The award itself wasn’t significant. The significance was that a Muslim group was being legitimized by a politician and immediately the anti-Muslim hit machine went into gear, full speed. Guys like Joe Kaufman raging anti-Muslim bigots. Kaufman has written in favor of terrorist groups. He’s written on the radical Jewish defense league Web site.

Now let’s look at what Joe has written:

Let me state for the record, NEVER have I written in favor of Kahane Chai or Kach. And NEVER have I written anything for the Jewish Defense League or the group’s website. These things NEVER happened. These are lies, and they are being told for one simple reason — to discredit me and the good work that I and the group I represent have done with regard to the subject of terrorism, which includes that of CAIR.

What I did do was write an article, six years ago, about slain Rabbi Meir Kahane, entitled ‘A Kahane Legacy Lost.’ The article was written for the Jewish Israeli Magazine, to which I was a writer and editor for. The piece centered around a planned speaking engagement of Kahane’s at my university, which was to take place in November of 1990. He was murdered 17 days prior to the event.

Kahane’s assassination was the first instance of Islamist terrorism inside the United States. His attacker and those that plotted his murder were connected to the terrorist group that was responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. That group, Maktab al-Khidmat, would later be known as the predecessor of Al-Qaeda.

While all of the above is true, CAIR has intentionally resorted to lies and defamation, of both my character and my work. This signals the desperation of a group that knows it is on the way out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a contributor to Americans Against Hate’s blog. I also consider Joe to be a friend. With that said, I don’t feel compelled to agree with everything that Joe says. When I agree with Joe, something I frequently do, it’s because Joe has done his diligence as an investigative reporter who found the truth. Simply put, it’s my opinion that Joe is an expert on terrorist networking on a par with Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson.

Hooper didn’t just disparage Kaufman. Before disparaging him, he went on this diatribe:

ZAHN: Let me go on to say what else Senator Boxer had to release in a news conference. She says it was a volume of things, not one single thing, that several CAIR council members had been indicted on terrorist-related charges. And she is certainly not the only senator who’s been critical of your organization. Senator Schumer has accused your organization, saying it has ties to terrorism. And Senator Dick Durbin is saying CAIR is unusual, quote, “In its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect”.
Do the all three have it wrong here?
HOOPER: First of all, let me deal with the issue of the former FBI official slamming CAIR. Notice the word former. No sitting FBI official has criticized CAIR. We work with the FBI repeatedly at the local and national level and we have for a number of years. This is a 12 year-old quote from a former official who worked in league with Islamophobes.
ZAHN: All right, but a lot of people who are critical of your group are critical of the fact that today that CAIR will not condemn Hamas or Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
HOOPER: We practically have a rubber stamp saying CAIR condemns blank act of terrorism. We have repeatedly, consistently condemned terrorism in all its form, including a tax on Israeli civilians by Hamas, by Hezbollah. We have condemned it repeatedly.
ZAHN: But condemning an act is a very different thing that condemning these organizations as terrorist organizations.
HOOPER: We are not going to submit to pro-Israel litmus tests that these groups seek to impose on American Muslims. No Muslim is going to pass this test to being pro-Israel.
ZAHN: That’s what you say is at the core of this, there is no truth to any of these allegations about accepting money from groups that are closely associated with Hamas, associated with Hezbollah?
HOOPER: Ridiculous.
ZAHN: You know terrorism experts like Steven Emerson found a paper trail.
HOOPER: Yes, I would put the terrorism experts in quotes. This is the same guy who said Muslims carried out the attack on the Murrow federal building in Oklahoma City building in 1995. And we see what happened after that.
ZAHN: Do you think the goal really is to silence American Muslims?
HOOPER: It’s to delegitimize, it’s to marginalize, it’s to silence anyone who would speak out against the state of Israel and it’s brutal policies towards the Palestinians.

Examine that last sentence closely. Hooper is saying that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, who are now governed by the terrorist organization Hamas, are brutal. In other words, he’s taken sides with Hamas. Not only did he take sides with Hamas but he said it only moments after saying that “We have repeatedly, consistently condemned terrorism in all its forms.”

Perhaps Mr. Hooper could explain how you can side with Hamas while “repeatedly, consistently [condemning] terrorism.” If he can, he’s far smarter than I am because I don’t know how you can support terrorists while simultaneously condemning them.

Notice Mr. Hooper’s constant attempts to discredit Mssrs. Emerson and Kaufman, his repetitive name-calling and his anti-Israel rhetoric. Notice Hooper’s recalling a prediction that Steve Emerson made about who destroyed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, acting as though Emerson didn’t have a basis for thinking that Islamic terrorists had destroyed it. He acts as if the first World Trade Center bombing didn’t happen. He acts as if Emerson’s statements, made in the first hours after the Murrah bombing, were unjustified and unreasonable.

Last but not least, notice what he didn’t do: he didn’t offer a bit of proof that Joe Kaufman’s claims about Basim Elkarra were false. Here’s what Kaufman said about Elkarra:

As Executive Director, Basim Elkarra has defended someone that trained for jihad in a Pakistani terrorist camp; he has defended an imam that urged a Pakistani crowd to wage attacks on America; and he has defended an imam that was attempting to build an Islamic school for the purpose of teaching children how to commit violent acts against Americans. As well, Elkarra has described Israel as a “racist” and “apartheid” state, and he has moderated an event that featured a Hamas operative who spent five years in an Israeli prison and who is currently on trial in the U.S.

In fact, you look closely, all he’s done in response is respond with name-calling.

That’s hardly the reaction of a man with the facts on his side.

Technorati Tags: Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR, Joe Kaufman, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Hamas, Palestinians, Anti-Semitism, Barbara Boxer

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 10:11 am and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Boxer, Corruption, Homeland Security, Middle East, Religion, Subversives, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.