New York Times Houston bureau chief J. David Goodman sounded aggrieved in his Texas-based story in Wednesday’s paper, “Texas Declares Muslim Civil Rights Group a Terrorist.” This is how liberal papers routinely describe leftist agitators. They're "civil rights groups."
As for the phrase “Muslim Civil Rights Group,” the Times is actually talking about the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-linked Islamic pressure group. "Civil rights group" should not describe a radical group whose national executive director Nihad Awad declared himself happy about the October 7 massacre by Hamas -- a story covered by the Times in December 2023 but ignored in this new story. "I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land," Awad said.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas declared on Tuesday that one of the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy and civil rights groups is a foreign terrorist organization, saying the move will prohibit the organization from acquiring land in Texas and authorize the state attorney general “to sue to shut them down” in Texas.
In his declaration, Mr. Abbott said that the group, the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, had direct ties to Hamas, which has been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government. The nonprofit, known by its initials, CAIR, has denied having any such ties.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has also designated CAIR a terrorist group.
The governor also suggested, without offering evidence, that CAIR’s leadership sought to impose Islamic law, known as Shariah, on Americans.
The council on Tuesday responded to Mr. Abbott in a letter, calling his declaration “defamatory” and saying it had “no basis in law or fact.”
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Anti-Muslim sentiment has been increasingly apparent in online discussions in Texas, and in brick-and mortar fights beyond the internet. At the start of the year, many Republican state leaders, including Mr. Abbott and the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, objected to a planned 400-acre residential development near Josephine, a town northeast of Dallas, that was designed to revolve around a new mosque. The proposed development, known as EPIC City, was organized by members of a suburban mosque in East Plano.
Since then, anti-Muslim sentiment has become more pronounced, especially after New Yorkers elected a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, to be the city’s next mayor.
Now who is sliming American Muslims as a whole? Do all Muslims support the massacre of October 7? Or if a disturbing percentage of them do, can they be described as "civil rights" activists?
Besides Abbott’s proclamation providing details into CAIR’s extremism and that of a related group, Muslim Brotherhood, there was the New York Post’s infuriating story Tuesday on the California branch of CAIR cutting checks to anti-Israel student agitators thrown out of college for harassing Jewish students. None of that information made it into Goodman’s account, who instead harrumphed about a supposed increase in “anti-Muslim sentiment,” but with no examples or data provided.
