CAIR Calls for Investigation of Steven Emerson’s Hate

Special Report CAIR Calls For Investigation of Steven Emerson’s Hate Group By Delinda C. Hanley

THERE’S A MOLE inside your organization, warned the tipster in an email sent last year to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights group. Soon the e-mailer, a whistleblower from the DC-based Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), led CAIR to a trove of recordings and transcripts. CAIR’s national office hired an outside forensic specialist to investigate the evidence.

In November, the specialist reported to CAIR that two Muslim insiders had been sharing information, “including surreptitiously recorded conversations, strategic plans and private emails,” with the IPT, the anti-Muslim hate group founded by Steven Emerson, a self-styled “terrorism expert.” For years, Emerson paid Muslim informants to hand over details of private conversations held by CAIR and other Muslim community leaders to IPT.

On Dec. 16, CAIR named Romin Iqbal, the longtime Columbus, Ohio CAIR chapter’s executive and legal director, as one of the infor-

mants. After his termination in December, the Columbus office discovered “suspicious purchases” from ammunition and gun retailers made on a credit card that was administered by Iqbal, according to Whitney Siddiqi, community affairs director for CAIR-Ohio. Soon after Iqbal’s exposure, the second man, Tariq Nelson, 48, voluntarily came forward to admit and apologize for working for IPT from 2008 to 2012. Nelson was once an active member of Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, VA. Nelson released a tax form showing that Emerson’s for-profit corporation paid him over $30,000 for just one of his many years of spying. He also supplied other damning evidence of (L‐r) Council on American‐Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad, then‐U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D‐MN) and Gold Star father Khizr Khan discuss President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel his work for IPT. Both men received thousands of dollars from Emerban at a Feb. 1, 2017 press conference in Washington, DC. son’s corporation for spying. John Sugg, editor of the Weekly Planet in the 1990s, and a senior editor of Creative Loafing Newspapers until he retired in 2008, has had lots to say about Emerson over the years. “Emerson collects money through a [501(c) (3)] non-profit, the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, and then funnels that money to his for-profit SAE (as in Steven A. Emerson) Productions,” Sugg wrote in an article published in the January/February 2011 Washington Report. Sugg quoted remarks by Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, to a Nashville paper: “Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit. It's wrong. This is off the charts.” At a Jan. 12 news conference, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad said his organization had reached out to the FBI about the longtime spying efforts because it was concerned that laws had been broken and because some of the leaked documents showed that Emerson was communicating with Israeli government officials. Edward Ahmed Mitchell, an attorney and former journalist who serves as CAIR’s naDelinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report on tional deputy director, showed e-mails from Emerson telling his staff Middle East Affairs. to help provide Israeli intelligence officers with research about Students

PHOTO BY ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

for Justice in Palestine. The Israeli government wanted any evidence they could find linking individual American college students to Hamas.

The anonymous IPT whistleblower told the Washington Post he decided to warn CAIR because, “I felt I was working for a [pro-Israel] lobbying organization and not against terrorism.”

On Feb. 1, American Muslim organizations and religious leaders joined CAIR for a virtual news conference to call on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate whether the IPT hate group violated any federal laws by using paid spies to infiltrate, record and undermine Muslim organizations, houses of worship and leaders, including then-Rep. Keith Ellison, for the benefit of a foreign government. Earlier that day, 83 Muslim civil society organizations and mosques sent a joint community letter to the Justice Department urging it to investigate the actions of IPT.

The Department of Justice Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires agents of foreign principals who are engaged in political activities to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with a foreign government. It is readily apparent, from the evidence CAIR has acquired, that the Department of Justice must require IPT to register as a foreign agent for Israel.

EMERSON HAS TARGETED CAIR FOR DECADES

Emerson has had a decades-long grudge against CAIR. Like clockwork each year, a small band of protesters screamed abuse at Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) supporters as they entered the annual fundraising banquet at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA. Emerson, the producer of the controversial 1994 PBS program “Jihad in America,” also heckled speakers at a CAIR news conference in 1996, bringing a camera crew that “led organizers to believe they represented PBS.” CAIR suspected Emerson was filming scenes for his next show.

Emerson also had a problem with the first Muslim member of Congress. IPT compiled a 40-plus-page dossier on Keith Ellison, who represented Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019. IPT’s dossier included his speeches and interviews, but Emerson was particularly focused on anything Rep. Ellison said about Palestinian human rights. Nelson admitted that he recorded private remarks made by thenRep. Ellison, at a fundraising dinner in a private home in 2010, suggesting U.S. Middle East policy was “governed” by Israeli interests. Ellison has said the publicly released 36-second clip was taken out of context. Six years later, in 2016, that recording was used by opponents of Ellison’s campaign at the time to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison lost.

In a statement to the Washington Post, now Minnesota’s Attorney General Ellison, addressed the issue of surveillance of the Muslim community. “The truth about the long campaign of disinformation—spying on Muslims engaged in legitimate First Amendment activity, paying people tens of thousands of dollars to conduct smear campaigns based on deception—continues to come out...If the last 10 years have shown us anything, it is that the so-called ‘Muslim scare’ was always deliberate disinformation pitting Americans against each other.”

Much of that Muslim scare was fomented by IPT, most likely with Israeli input, according to Sugg and other serious journalists. Yet the mainstream media rarely questioned Emerson’s claims and guilt-by-associationand-innuendo tactics. As a result of the recent exposure of IPT’s spying, reporters are finally looking at Emerson’s background, associations, financing and motives.

PHOTO SCREEN SHOT FROM C-SPAN CAIR’S ISLAMOPHOBIA REPORT

CAIR released a new Islamophobia report on Jan. 11, 2022, titled “Islamophobia in the Mainstream,” listing 35 charitable institutions and foundations that funneled almost $106 million to 26 anti-Muslim groups between 2017-2019. The anti-Muslim hate groups listed in the report include: The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Gatestone Institute, Center for Security Policy, Middle East Forum, Middle East Media Research Institute, David Horowitz Freedom Center, Clarion Project and, of course, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, among many others. According to the report, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism Inc., Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Schwab Charitable Fund, Marcus Foundation, the Adelson Family Foundation and the Jewish Communal Fund were among the top funders of the U.S. Islamophobia Network between 2017-2019. (It should be noted that Fidelity and Schwab Charitable Funds accept donations from all kinds of individuals and send funds to a wide range of truly upstanding public charities. They should be advised to look into which of these charities are actually hate groups.) Islamophobic attitudes and policies are propagated by special interest groups, like IPT, with deep sources of funding. IPT and other hate groups continue to work to negatively influence U.S. public opinion and government policy about Muslims and Islam. CAIR supporters hope that a thorough Steven Emerson warns about the growth of Islamic radi‐U.S. government investigation into IPT calism within the United States on C-SPAN on Nov. 28, will begin to curb funding for other ex2009. tremist hate groups. ■