CAIR's smear campaign mows down another American

Washington, D.C. talk radio station WMAL, 630 AM, has caved to pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim terror front group that has savaged journalists, critics of radical Islam, even the Fox TV show “24”—but which just as steadfastly has refused to specifically condemn various Islamic terrorist organizations.

After a three-week suspension, host Michael Graham was fired over the weekend for his comment on July 21 that “Islam has, sadly, become a terrorist organization.” According to formal statement issued by the host, Disney-owned WMAL terminated him for the original remarks and his refusal to apologize for them.

In buckling to pressure from CAIR, WMAL has sided with an organization that continually demonizes genuine criticism of radical Islam as “Islamophobia” and has never specifically condemned radical Islam or Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Not only did WMAL side with organization with three former officials who have been convicted, arrested, or deported on terror-related charges, but CAIR is a spin-off of a group described by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a "front group" for the terrorist group Hamas in the U.S.

CAIR was founded in 1994 by two former high-ranking officials with the Islamic Association for Palestine, a rabidly anti-Semitic organization known as Hamas’ biggest political booster in the United States.

Though CAIR’s mission is not to serve as an overt Hamas partisan, the organization has refused to specifically condemn the terrorist organization. Ditto for Hezbollah, which is responsible for murdering more Americans than any other terrorist group besides al Qaeda. And CAIR refused to condemn bin Laden or al Qaeda by name until three months after 9/11.

The Washington Post in November 2001 asked a CAIR spokesman to condemn Hamas or Islamic Jihad. He refused, explaining, “It’s not our job to go around denouncing.” Asked a similar question about Hamas and Hezbollah by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in February 2002, Hooper called such queries a “game” and added, “We’re not in the business of condemning.”