CAIR and Hamas

From Pajamas Media:

Last Thursday, I reported here exclusively at PJM on a DOJ memo dated March 31, 2010, from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. The memo effectively ended the prosecution of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad — in addition to the prosecution of other prominent American Muslim leaders — for helping support the Hamas terrorist organization. This decision, according to my source, was not made based on the overwhelming evidence that had been compiled over the past decade by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, but was made due to potential political embarrassment for the Obama administration and out of fear of inflaming the American Muslim community.

But another troubling claim came out during our interview: “Muslim outreach” programs by U.S. government agencies to terror-tied Islamic groups have directly interfered with ongoing terrorism investigations’

The DOJ’s behavior here is not especially surprising.  I had pretty much decided that our government – Democrat and Republican – is led by quislings, so everything else is just coloring in the details.  But I am surprised at CAIR.

That CAIR, Hamas, Al Qaeda share the same goal – to a first approximation, the destruction of Western Christendom and the establishment of an Islamic Caliphate, notwithstanding the different specific fronts at which they attack us – is obvious to anyone not blinded by political correctness.  But CAIR, at least momentarily, forgot the way terrorist organizations and political organizations work together.  By itself, terrorism, defined as the premeditated attack on non-combatants by non-state actors, almost never “works”:  almost all Western governments have standing policies never to negotiate with terrorists, and we seldom violate those policies.  But what they will do is what we are in fact doing:  respond to terrorism by finding political organizations that advertise themselves as advancing the interests, by non-violent means, of the same demographic from which the terrorist organization draws its members and surrender to them, concession by concession.  So while the terrorists seldom achieve power in the sense that its leaders replace the existing government, it wins on policy by seeing its objectives granted to an organization seeking identical ends.

CAIR has fulfilled its role in this symbiotic relationship quite well.  But it would ordinarily have been exceedingly risky for them to have formal ties with Hamas.  I say “ordinarily” because for one thing there was a chance that the USDOJ would have done its job and enforced the law against CAIR.  But for another, the popular tolerance for seeing their self-government surrendered will not survive the widespread realization that the “good Muslims” to whom they are surrendering are in fact the very same Muslims who are murdering them.  CAIR should have realized this.

As it happens, CAIR’s allies at USDOJ are covering for them.  But it could have gone badly.