Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) called for an Internal Revenue Services investigation into the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Tuesday, citing the nonprofit organization’s history of ties to terrorism.
“CAIR purports to be a civil rights organization dedicated to protecting the rights of American Muslims. But substantial evidence confirms CAIR has deep ties to terrorist organizations,” Cotton wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner Billy Long.
“In fact, in the largest terrorism-financing case in U.S. history, CAIR was listed as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee,” he continued. “Government exhibits from the trial revealed that CAIR’s founders participated in a meeting of Hamas supporters in Philadelphia, where they discussed strategies to advance the Islamist agenda in America while concealing their true affiliations.”
Founded in 1994 as a Muslim advocacy firm headquartered in Washington, D.C., CAIR’s ties to terror organizations have been investigated for decades. In 1993, just before the organization was launched, Nihad Awad, the co-founder Cotton referenced, attended a three-day summit of U.S. Hamas affiliates during which attendees discussed a strategy to disrupt the Oslo Accords.
The U.S. government also named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial, during which HLF officials were convicted of providing Hamas millions of dollars in support.
CAIR accused Cotton of repeating “debunked conspiracy theories” and decried what they called the senator’s “baseless” claims.
“We are an independent American civil rights organization that has spent over thirty years defending the Constitution, countering anti-Muslim bigotry, and opposing injustice here and abroad, including discrimination, hate crimes, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide,” CAIR said in a statement.
“We specifically condemned the Oct. 7th attacks on civilians, just as we condemn the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This is called moral consistency. Senator Cotton should try it.”
An IRS spokesman confirmed to National Review that the agency received the letter in question, but was not able to disclose if the IRS was investigating or examining CAIR.
Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, CAIR officials expressed a level of support for Palestinian resistance that shocked both Republicans and Democrats. Awad, the current executive director of CAIR, wrote hours after Hamas’s attack on October 7 that “all Arab peoples must go out on Sunday, October 8th, and every day, in demonstrations in support of the Palestinians and in rejection of normalization with the occupier and the apartheid regime.”
In the weeks following the attack, Awad accused Israeli survivors of lying about the murder and rape they had witnessed, and, said at an annual American Muslims for Palestine conference that he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”
President Joe Biden’s White House even quietly removed CAIR from its “National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism” after Awad made his remarks.
“We condemn these shocking, antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said at the time. “The horrific, brutal terrorist attacks committed by Hamas on October 7th were, as President Biden said, ‘abhorrent’ and represent ‘unadulterated evil…The atrocities of that day shock the conscience, which is why we can never forget the pain Hamas has caused for so many innocent people.”
CAIR was involved in a host of other scandals post-October 7. The organization’s Maryland director Zainab Chaudry was removed from the state’s hate-crime commission after she likened Israel to Nazi Germany, and CAIR’s former Kentucky director of government affairs Noora Shalash demanded Jihad in February and said that she wants “ISIS to kill all of you.” The group has defended, on social media, in court, and materially, anti-Israel students leading campus demonstrations.
Republicans have expressed concerns about CAIR’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood for decades.
In 2011 during a congressional hearing, then-New York Representative Peter King said that the organization had been “discredited” and then-Minnesota Representative Chip Cravaack agreed that CAIR was “basically” a “terrorist organization.”
Neurosurgeon, once-presidential hopeful, and former Housing and Urban Development Director Ben Carson also declared in 2015 that “the Department of State should designate the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations that propagate or support Islamic terrorism as terrorist organizations . . . and fully investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and a supporter of terrorism.”
Carson sought to revoke CAIR’s nonprofit status at the time.
As a 501(c)(3) organization meant to operate for charitable, educational, or religious purposes, CAIR is “prohibited from providing material support to terrorism,” Cotton wrote in his letter.
“Tax-exempt status is a privilege, not a right, and it should not subsidize organizations with links to terrorism.”