Mission Statement
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) describes itself as a non-profit grassroots membership organization devoted to promoting justice, mutual understanding and empowerment on behalf of American Muslims. CAIR has so successfully cultivated its image as “America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization” that – despite a long history of ties to suspect groups in America and abroad – it is still seen as the indispensable representative of the American Muslim community by some mainstream media outlets.
This site documents many questionable actions on the part of CAIR, but the unifying concept is that CAIR is acting as a foreign agent. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires any agent of a foreign principal- including any foreign states, political parties, corporations, non-governmental organizations and individuals- to register with the U.S. government as a foreign agent. Here we have compiled numerous examples of CAIR taking money from foreign principals, having meetings with foreign principals, and attempting to influence United States policy on behalf of those foreign principals. An American entity engaged in such activities is required to register under FARA. Indeed thousands of American entities have registered under FARA and continued to do business legally, but CAIR has operated in this capacity since its founding in 1994 and has failed to properly identify itself as such to the Department of Justice and the American public.
We have established this education center as a common library for all relevant public and open-source documentation on CAIR. It will serve as a central clearing house for years of accumulated research conducted by non-profit research centers as well as Department of Justice prosecutors and the media. This will enable independent researchers to explore these documents more deeply and to communicate, collaborate, and share their analysis with the greater research community. In addition we will maintain an “Open Topics” page to identify ongoing research projects and enlist the help of both the academic and the non-profit research communities. At this time we are particularly interested in people with expertise in accounting, taxes, and real estate, but we encourage anyone with an interest in investigating the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in America to contribute.
CAIR is not alone in representing the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. Many other groups such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) and the Muslim Arab Youth Association (MAYA) were identified as “joint venturers” in the Holy Land Foundation terror-funding trial. The tools we develop at the CAIR Observatory are designed to establish a practical model to be reused and adapted when compiling evidence of the illegal behavior of any organization representing the Muslim Brotherhood or the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the United States.