Rise of the ‘Iran Lobby’

Council for American-Iranian Relations

The Council for American-Iranian Relations (CAIR) was, like NIAC established as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt  organization, founded in Washington, DC in 1994 with a stated mission “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.”⁶³

In truth, CAIR has had a very different agenda.  It has been linked in the Muslim Brotherhood’s own documents to the latter’s North American network and has been named in two federal terrorist trials as an unindicted co-conspirator for participation in the illicit channeling of funding to Hamas.⁶⁴  Based on its activities, associations, and statements, CAIR’s unspoken objectives seem to be directed to blurring the aggressive and violent history of Islam and attacking all official U.S. government efforts to crack down on Islamist terrorism and its associated financial and recruitment activities in the United States, as well as using America’s own legal system to silence critics.

Less well appreciated is CAIR’s de facto alliance with the movement to steer U.S. foreign policy towards rapprochement with the Iranian mullahs’ regime in Tehran. It is clear that senior CAIR representatives were speaking and writing actively on behalf of the mullahs’ regime as early as the late 1990s.⁶⁵  In fact, CAIR as an organization also has consistently supported Tehran regime positions, as in the following instances:

In December 1997, CAIR condemned the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance for a display that featured Adolf Hitler juxtaposed with the Ayatollah Khomeini. In March 1999, CAIR attacked an article by Elaine Sciolino that appeared in the New York Times the previous month because the piece had criticized Iranian discrimination against women.⁶⁶

Dr. Anisa Abd el Fattah (nee Caroline Keeble) was a member of CAIR’s board of directors in 1999 when she co-hosted a panel sponsored by the United Association for Studies and Research (a no-shuttered Hamas front group and another unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trials) entitled “U.S. and Iran: Time to Talk.” The Iranian ambassador to the UN, Sayyid Hadi Najad had been invited to appear, but was barred from the event by the Department of State.

In addition, CAIR promotes the normalization of U.S. relations with Iran.  Its March 17, 2000 press release applauding Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s statements of abject apology to the Tehran regime is a representative example of its views in this regard.⁶⁷

As noted above, CAIR’s aggressive legal harassment of analysts, bloggers, speakers, writers and others who seek to expose the spread of the Islamic Jihad agenda in the United States is well-documented and constitutes a prime sample of the phenomenon dubbed “lawfare,” whereby litigation, treaties and international as well as domestic courts are turned into weapons used against America and its interests.

CAIR has also turned its attention to journalists and even cartoonists who have had the temerity to criticize Iranian support for terrorism across the Middle East. A case in point is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez, whose September 2007 depiction in the Columbus Dispatch of cockroaches scurrying out of a sewer grate labeled “Iran” and “Extremism” and across a map of the Middle East, prompted CAIR to post an Action Request up on its website, urging the organization’s members and friends to register their criticisms of the artist.⁶⁸

CAIR’s consistent advocacy on behalf of Tehran kicked into high gear with the Department of State’s decision in 2006 to issue a visa to former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami so he could attend the Alliance of Civilizations meeting at the UN. The decision by then-Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns to allow Khatami to participate in the sixth annual commemoration of the 9/11 attacks seems downright obscene in light of the fact that this consummate regime insider was president during the years when Iran accelerated its nuclear weapons program, that he presided over the so-called “chain murders” of Iran’s most prominent scholars and academics in 1998, that he crushed the student uprising of 1999, and that he represents a regime that provided support to the 9/11 hijackers, as well as safe haven to al-Qaeda killers fleeing Tora Bora.

That was not, of course, the way CAIR saw it. National CAIR leaders, including Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s director of Strategic Communications, executive director Nihad Awad, and national vice chairman of the board of directors Ahmad Al-Akhras were all on hand to welcome Khatami to a private dinner and reception at the Marriott Crystal Gateway Hotel in Crystal City, Virginia on September 8, 2006. Sharing the dais with Khatami were AIC President Hooshang Amirahmadi and the Sudanese Ambassador to the United States.

The Episcopal Bishop of Washington’s National Cathedral, John Bryson Chane, also had hosted the terror regime’s former president earlier that same day. Khatami used his “Dialogue of Civilizations” speech before a packed crowd in the cathedral of 1,200 to defend Iran’s nuclear program as “peaceful” and suggested the world should focus instead on Israel’s nuclear arsenal.⁶⁹  After Bishop Chane accepted a reciprocal invitation to visit Iran in 2007, he returned to convene a panel discussion on “The U.S. and Iran: A Difficult History” at the Cathedral on October 29, 2007. Featured panelists were a number of the Iran Lobby’s “usual suspects” including: former Tehran hostage Ambassador Bruce Laingen, NIAC’s Trita Parsi and the panel moderator, NIAC advisory board member and former U.S. Congressman Wayne Gilchrist.⁷⁰  Other participants were former New York Times reporter and author Stephen Kinzer and Dr. Abbas Amanat, a Yale University Professor of History and International and Area Studies.

The following interconnected organizations and their leaderships will illustrate even more clearly the varied and complex relationships nurtured both subtly and overtly by NIAC, CAIR and others on behalf of the Tehran regime.