Year: 2009

CAIR spokesboy Ahmed Rehab deposits a few piles of steaming taqiyya on FOX and gets away with it:

Robert Spencer:

Ahmed Rehab of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), fresh from a victory over free speech at the American Library Association, claims that he supports the Constitution, but that’s the least of it. In this Fox News interview, he strews the path to any clear understanding of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir Islamic supremacist conference in Chicago with red herrings.

Rehab says about Hizb-ut-Tahrir, “This organization has been on the record privately and publicly condemning terrorism.” (So has Rehab been in private contact with the leaders of Hizb-ut-Tahrir?) But terrorism is only part of the problem. Rehab has nothing of substance to say about Hizb-ut-Tahrir’s explicit desire to impose Islamic law upon the United States other than to assert blandly that he and others like him believe in the Constitution — which completely sidesteps the question of whether they want to exploit contemporary understandings of that Constitution’s protections and guarantees in order to bring elements of Sharia here.

He says he believes in capitalism, voting, and civic responsibility, but the reporters don’t ask him anything about Sharia. Nor do they ask him any probing questions about the fact that CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case. Its operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several of its former officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. Several of its other officials have made Islamic supremacist statements (Omar Ahmad and Ibrahim Hooper are quoted at the link). CAIR also was involved in the Flying Imams’ intimidation suit against the passengers who reported their suspicious behavior.

I suspect that this video also shows why Rehab ducked me instead of meeting me on the ALA panel — he could be reasonably sure that the Fox anchors here would not be informed enough to ask him uncomfortable questions, but I would not hesitate.

Robert Spencer has more:

 

In “The Islam-Basher and the Librarian Kerkuffle” at the Huffington Post, July 14, Ahmed Rehab of Hamas-linked CAIR-Chicago, who just succeeded in strong-arming the American Library Association into canceling a panel on which I had been scheduled to appear, crows about his campaign against free speech and the truth about Islamic jihad.

Rehab  left out a few facts about his employer. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case. Its operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several of its former officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. Several of its other officials have made Islamic supremacist statements. CAIR also was involved in the Flying Imams’ intimidation suit against the passengers who reported their suspicious behavior.

Read it all…

What the interviewers should have asked Rehab:

CAIR rep throws out red herrings on Fox News about Islamic supremacist group

Hugh Fitzgerald:

What is the point to having someone on, and supposedly subjecting him to probing questioning, when there is no probing questioning, and cannot be, because the interviewers know little or nothing of the Qur’an, Hadith, Sira, know nothing of the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest, know nothing of the doctrines in Islam — taqiyya and kitman –that constitute religiously-sanctioned lying for the sake of protecting the Faith and the Believers, know nothing, either, about CAIR or about the individual, Ahmed Rehab, in question. 

They are drunk only on their own media importance, and do not understand the responsibility they have to their audience, a responsibility that naturally includes being well-prepared not on everything that they must discuss, but certainly the gravest matters. And there is no matter as grave, and as ill-understood, by both the political and media elites, and by the masses whom they presume to protect and instruct, than Islam. They are not meeting their responsibility. 

They are, as I noted, drunk with their station in life and the station which gives them prominence. And obviously, when they persist in remaining so inebriated with money and power and fame, they will never be able to deal adequately wtih, respond to inteligently, in any way even manage to get to…Rehab.

What would a well-prepared interviewer have asked Rehab? 

Let’s take one example: Rehab’s insistence that he “supports” the Constitution. An intelligent and well-prepared interviewer would then attempt to probe further, to find out what this means or could mean. 

He would ask: 

1. Do you, as you put it, “support” the First Amendment fully, including the right to unhindered free speech (save for the exceptions made for speech or speech acts likely to lead to “imminent lawless violence”:), including the right to criticize any ideology, including those called “religions”? 

2. Do you support the right of free speech enshrined in the First Amendment, including the free speech right which is generally recognized in the Western world, as in such countries as Denmark and the Netherlands, and which is not recognized in the lands where Muslims dominate? 

3. For example, would you defend the right of Americans to publish those cartoons of Muhammad that, when published in Denmark, resulted in diplomatic and economic boycotts, in death threats against Danes, and actual attacks by Muslims on some Danish companies and offices abroad? Do you deplore such attacks and would you uphold the right of Americans to exercise their right of free speech? 

4. Since you say you “support the Constitution” which is a remark that is vague, and is meaningless without further detail, a fleshing out of this assertion, could you tell me whether or not you recognize deep differences between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which contains within it, in essence, the guarantees of individual rights in the American Constitution which is popularly known as the Bill of Rights, and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights Under Islam, and whether you support, as you put it, the American and, more generally, Western version of such rights, or whether you support that very different “Islamic” version embodied in the Cairo Declaration? And please specifically address three guarantees of individual rights from governmwent interference: 1) Freedom of speech 2) Free exercise of religion and 3) the Establishment Clause. 

That’s a start.