Weeks after the Hamas murders, rapes and kidnappings of Oct 7, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) began meeting with attorney generals around the country.
Beyond
CAIR’s existing effort to establish that Muslims, not Jews, were the
real victims, the Islamist organization whose roots are linked to the
Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of Hamas, were persuading
top state prosecutors to go after Jewish anti-terror activists.
CAIR’s
San Francisco Bay Area staff and Islamist allies met with California
Attorney General Rob Bonta and urged him to enforce laws against what
the group claimed was “doxxing”. Under California law, doxxing can be
punished by up to a
year in prison. Bonta has been considering running for governor and
might be amenable to doing what it took to win Islamist support.
Shortly
afterward, CAIR’s Massachusetts chapter met with Attorney General
Andrea Campbell and urged her to create an “anti-doxxing task force” to
target pro-Israel and Jewish groups. CAIR MA’s legal director claimed
that it had met with Campbell to “flesh out what current laws might
apply and what possibly new ones might help in these situations.” The
attorney general’s office expressed concern about “harassment”, but fell
short of promising to lock up journalists.
There’s no word on
whether that task force was ever created, but the obvious target would
have been the Jewish activists, organizations and journalists
investigating antisemitism at Harvard.
CAIR was worried about anyone exposing its support for terrorism and it had good reason to be.
Next
month, CAIR founder and executive director Nihad Awad, who had
previously expressed support for Hamas, appeared at the American Muslims
For Palestine (AMP) convention, and cheered the Oct 7 attacks,
claiming that the Gazans would be “victorious” because they did not
fear death, “if they would like to die, they will go to another heaven.”
No
one would have known about this Jihadist propaganda if MEMRI, one of
the research organizations collecting materials, had not seen it and then ‘doxxed’ CAIR’s boss by posting it.
And
if CAIR were to succeed in criminalizing such investigations, the truth
about its support for Islamic terrorism and the murder of Jews might
have never seen the light of day.
When the video went public, the
Biden administration was forced to temporarily break with CAIR and
jettison the Islamist hate group from its previously published
antisemitism strategy.
But CAIR was already looking for allies in the government looking to criminalize journalism.
California’s
‘doxxing’ laws, created to prevent cyberstalking against women by
ex-boyfriends, penalized emails and pictures distributed “with intent to
place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety” leading
to “unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment.”
These laws were never meant to silence investigative reporting or cover for terror supporters.
CAIR’s
‘Guide to Doxxing’ however listed pro-Israel “websites such as the
Canary Mission and the Jew Hate Database” as examples of “doxxing
websites”. The cover of the ‘doxxing’ guide features a censored version
of a billboard truck that Accuracy in Media (AIM) used in Harvard which
had listed the student leaders who were behind the infamous Harvard
Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) letter that had blamed Israel and
not Hamas for Oct 7.
What CAIR was really looking to do was shut down and even criminalize sites like MEMRI and Canary Mission,
and organizations like the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which had
compiled numerous examples of Islamic leaders and activists who had
endorsed the Oct 7 attacks and called for further attacks on Jews.
On October 13, Front Page Magazine published my article listing the open support for the atrocities
by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters and key figures on
campuses across the country. While we exposed them, CAIR was trying to
criminalize such investigative journalism as “doxxing” and meeting with
attorney generals to convince them to lock us up.
Contrary to
CAIR’s claims, no personal contact information was being posted and no
one was being doxxed. While Islamists and their allies have slurred
Canary Mission as a “doxxing website”, it does not post the personal
contact information of terror supporters, but does expose the activities
of campus leaders and it republishes their public comments about
killing Jews.
This isn’t “doxxing”: it’s journalism.
Efforts
to make Canary Mission seem threatening reached their height in a hit
piece at The Nation which claimed that “Canary Mission agents have also
been involved in physical intimidation” when “two powerful men in yellow
canary outfits” showed up at a George Washington University BDS vote
and “then engaged in a strange and frightening dance”. An anti-Israel
activist told the pro-terrorist leftist magazine that she found “these
two fully grown, muscular men in these bird costumes, strutting… pretty
unbelievably terrifying.”
No one is actually terrified of dancing
canaries, but some CAIR figures and their Islamist allies hate being
quoted and love adopting victimhood to cover up their attacks and
abuses.
Whether it’s anti-Israel activists who claim to be
terrified of the “strange and frightening dance” of the canaries or
CAIR’s claim that quoting Islamists is the same as doxxing them, the
pro-terrorist movement is once again claiming victimhood to be able to
silence critics.
CAIR’s quiet campaign to criminalize journalism
went mainstream with the release of its report “FATAL: THE RESURGENCE OF
ANTI-MUSLIM HATE”. Despite the title, it could only point to one single
supposed killing. Instead, the majority of its report was dedicated to
complaining about the consequences of supporting Hamas.
CNN and
other media outlets rushed to report on FATAL and promoted CAIR’s
“doxxing” claims, but the Islamist group had bigger ambitions than just
media profiles.
CAIR’s FATAL urged that “Congress must enhance
anti-doxxing laws.” What would such laws look like? The report cited 18
U.S. Code § 119 which imposes sentences of 5 years in prison for anyone
revealing information about the witnesses and jurors in a federal court
case.
Having started with a year in prison in California, CAIR had worked its way up to five years.
Neither
CNN nor any other media outlet seemed interested in considering the
consequences of such a law on their own profession which is all about
exposing what people say and do. If reporting the public statements of
Hamas supporters is to be a crime, where does it end?
CAIR, like Hamas, excels at playing the victim even as it’s staging horrifying attacks.
Hamas
supporters had rebranded Arab Muslims in Gaza, the majority of whom
support Hamas, as victims of genocide. CAIR is now working to rebrand
supporters of Hamas in America as victims of doxxing. And the only thing
standing in the way of CAIR’s plans is the Constitution.
CAIR claims to be a civil rights group when it’s actually waging a war on civil rights.
For now, even in California, we can still safely quote CAIR boss Nihad Awad’s statement that,
“the people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the
concentration camp, on October 7. And yes, I was happy to see people
breaking the siege.” But for how long?
California’s Democratic
Party establishment, from Gov. Newsom on down, bowed to CAIR, and
demanded that Israel cease its attacks on Hamas. How long until they
agree that anyone who commits the crime of quoting CAIR and other Hamas
supporters should be locked up in prison?
“The future must not
belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” Obama once preached
and went on to lock up a man for making a YouTube video about Mohammed.
How long until states start locking up those who tell the truth about Islamic terrorism?
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.
