Hiding in Plain Sight: The Muslim Mafia

Below is a review of “Muslim Mafia” that was originally published at Europe News. Many thanks to Henrik for permission to repost it here.


Hiding in plain sight: The Muslim Mafia
by Henrik Ræder Clausen

Muslim Mafia:
Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America
By P. David Gaubatz & Paul Sperry (author of Infiltration)
448 pages, hardcover, ISBN 978-1935071105

This book is a thriller. It’s about the secret agenda of a seemingly benign and relevant organization promoting “civil rights” for religious minorities. A secret agenda deceptively aiming to undermine the Constitutional order of the United States of America, replacing it with religious law. The group deceptively presents itself as promoter of dialogue and mutual understanding, a peaceful alternative to the terrorist-supporting fundamentalists, yet never contributing materially to stopping terrorist plots. That group is CAIR.

Or, as the Anti-CAIR web site puts it:

Let there be no doubt that the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a terrorist supporting front organization that is partially funded by terrorists, founded by terrorists, and that CAIR wishes nothing more than the implementation of Sharia Law in America.

Now, how would one go about proving such claims?

Easy: You just get someone to work at their headquarters, sift through their archive of sensitive and possibly incriminating material, carry boxes of selected material out the door for scrutiny. That someone, providing more than 12,000 pages of evidence, was Chris Gaubatz.

Then to organize the information found, connect the dots and make a readable account of what was found in the documents, you need an experienced special agent well versed in Arabic, and an author able to present the material in a format accessible for the average reader. P. David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry did those tasks, the result is the book “Muslim Mafia”.

What they produced is a real page-turner, in which most chapters producing a cliffhanger for the next, and each chapter provides yet another round of damning evidence of conspiracy and deception. In these days of Political Correctness, Conspiracy against the State may not be sufficient ground for dissolving an organization — in particular not one dealing with religious matters — for any charges this serious are likely to be countered by one that is widely feared in spite of its nonsensical nature, that of ‘Discrimination’. For this reason, it is imperative that citizens at large become informed, that they can judge for themselves and speak up if they encounter similar activities in their vicinity.

And “Muslim Mafia” does quite a job of accomplishing this. Written much like fictional thrillers, it goes through various aspects of CAIR’s operations chapter by chapter. And even though not a single gun is fired in its pages, the web of plotting and intrigue, incompetence and undeserved successes, is sure to catch the attention of anyone interested in the matter.

As the plot unfolds, a lot of important and useful information is conveyed: That includes identifying weaknesses of CAIR, such as their fragile financial situation and their shallow membership base, Muslim Brotherhood roots and their participation in the Holy Land Foundation material support for Hamas and Islamic terrorism.

Talking of the Muslim Brotherhood, it’s worth repeating their credo, that we may remember what liasing with them implies. Not exactly respect for the US Constitution:

Allah is our goal, the Prophet is our guide, the Quran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, and death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition.

Apart from the detailed account of CAIR itself, this book is also exemplary in a different way: It shows just which kind of background information to look for in Islamic organizations, to figure out if they are moderate and democratic, or have a hidden agenda of subversion and implementation of Sharia law in the US, or elsewhere. This is a golden lesson for citizen warriors.

All told, there really isn’t any good reason not to read this book. It’s entertaining, informative and extensively documented. Also it’s very straightforward, a welcome contrast to government and intelligence reports on subversive activities, which few would read outside of professional circles. This is investigative journalism and transparent intelligence work at its finest.

Review opinion: 6/6 — get it, read it!

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Since it is a rather straightforward book, writing an extensive essay based on it isn’t really needed. Instead, I’ll highlight some of the findings to whet the appetite.

The basis of the book is an undercover operation executed by a few private individuals. Counterterrorism specialist P. David Gaubatz arranged for his son Chris to penetrate CAIR under the pretense of being a recent convert to Islam. Chris applied for — and got — a 6 month internship at CAIR, where he participated in the daily work, gained the confidence of their leaders, and learned much about their operations.

That is useful in itself, but the real scoop came by chance. One day the office manager at CAIR asked the interns to shred the basement archives, and as the other interns weren’t quite interested, Chris discreetly took the opportunity. Each day he’d spend hours in the basement discriminating the trivial from the significant, shredding the former and loading the latter in the trunk of his car, taking it away for examination, a total of over 12,000 pages. Muslim Mafia is based on this evidence.

Founding fathers: The Hamas connection

It was back in 1993, in Philadelphia, that Hamas representatives in the US met in order to figure out how to gain wider public acceptance and avoid being ‘marked’ as Hamas front organizations. Those organizations, now defunct, were the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and United Association for Studies and Research (UASR). Their being marked as suspicious made it problematic for them to raise funds for Hamas suicide bombings and other activities. A new media-savvy organization which would stand as untainted by any terrorist ties, yet ‘coordinated’ with existing Islamic networks in America. As FBI federal agent Lara Burns concluded after examining the wiretaps, that organization was CAIR.

CAIR was formally founded September 15th 1994, with a leadership mainly from IAP, as well as UASR. It was about time, too, for in 1995 Hamas was designated a “Foreign terrorist organization” and providing support for it became illegal. While CAIR doesn’t mention Hamas by name, it routinely refuses to condemn terrorist attacks like the 2001 bombing of a Tel Aviv night club, and was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the later case against the Holy Land Foundation. The message is clear and bears repeating (page 46):

The US government says CAIR has conspired to support terrorists. In other words, CAIR is the enemy in the war on terror.

One wonders how the mainstream media can have failed to report on this important information.

Cooperation in the War on terror

One of the chief objectives of CAIR is to conduct ‘Diversity training’ — bridging the Islamic society with US law enforcement. That is, police, FBI, etcetera. One might wonder why this is useful to CAIR, which could go around doing its religious work and let police handle criminal matters, but there are good reasons for CAIR to work in this field. One is to “help police departments understand the Islamic community” (also known as “sensitivity training”, “increasing cultural awareness”, “avoiding police misconduct” etc.), another is to prevent any activities in the police that may put Islam in a bad light, such as the courses on radical Islam conducted by the Higgins Center, cancelled in 2006 by Fairfax County Police Chief David Rohrer.

The efforts of CAIR to protect Islam from any negative exposure is not limited to guiding law enforcement to the desired interpretation of what is observed in the Islamic community. They also actively work to change what is observed in the first place, which is quite easy given their connections inside the police force. One example: For “sensitivity reasons”, CAIR was asked in advance to help concerning an FBI raid on the Saudi-backed Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America (Merrifield, Virginia). The result was exceptional, reports an FBI source:

“By the time we went in, the place was sterile. They had cleaned it all out. It was bad, very bad.”

“They were warned by CAIR that we were coming to do a search warrant.”

“We were pissed. It was obvious to us they knew we were coming.”

The effectiveness of CAIR in this area is sure to have pleased their Middle East backers.

Friends in high places

After the 9/11 attacks, there was an acute fear that CAIR would be suspected of having terrorist links or even of being a front organization for terrorist supporting networks. But due to the skills of CAIR operatives, a meeting with President Bush was set up within a week:

“It is my honor to meet with leaders who feel just the same way I do,” an unsuspecting Bush announced. “They’re outraged, they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.”

While the President can to some extent be excused for making mistakes in the confusing days right after 9/11, leaving the vetting of Islamic contacts to the Saudi-funded Islamic Center was an unusually poor move. It was probably done on the assumption that moderate Muslims were bound to exist, that our friends the Saudis were the best suited to find them, and that a civil liberties activist group would be the best possible choice, or perhaps the only possible choice.

It would seem that the Administration’s deception detector was in serious need of adjustment.

For while rubbing shoulders with the President and other high-standing members of Government provides no hard protection against suspicion and scrutiny, it does provide soft, intangible protection. How can one suspect the friends of those beyond suspicion? While it doesn’t bar FBI from conducting investigations against CAIR and their friends, it significantly reduces the risk that this will happen. And sure enough, for another seven years FBI was working extensively with CAIR and its sister group ISNA for them to conduct “sensitivity training” and other education within the force.

Then in August 2008, the contacts from FBI to CAIR were abruptly cut. The FBI in Washington had found extensive documentation linking CAIR to the Muslim Brotherhood and a widespread network of terrorism-funding Islamic organizations, leading to the conviction of the Holy Land Foundation for material support to terrorism. In this situation, even the best of photos linking CAIR to the President or other high-ranking politicians could not help, and CAIR had to resort to other methods. They called for a boycott:

If the FBI does not accord fair and equitable treatment to every American Muslim organization, including CAIR, ISNA and NAIT, then Muslim organizations, mosques and individuals will have no choice but to consider suspending all outreach activities with FBI offices, agents and other personnel.

The irony of this appears lost on CAIR, for they threatened nothing more than FBI had already done, halt outreach activities. But hidden in the statement is also a subtle accusation, that FBI was not dealing fairly with Muslim organizations in America. Under normal circumstances this would merely be laughed at, but in today’s climate of political correctness, such subtle threats can have significant teeth.

It’s not that CAIR and the other organizations ever contributed to halting any terrorist plots (that should be the issue, but isn’t) but rather that liaising with an Islamic organization — any one, for that matter — would deflect suspicions that our problems with terrorism are related to Islam as such, and bring a positive spin on the security situation. Friends of CAIR in Government (Keith Ellison, for example) and the FBI are working to accomplish that, and given President Obama’s ongoing efforts to reach out to Muslims everywhere, they just might be successful eventually.

There is more, much more, in Muslim Mafia. At just over 300 pages excluding notes and references, it lists one embarrassing fact after the other. In the process it manages to expose not only CAIR, but also a clueless or spineless Administration which over and over has failed to connect the dots, or failed to react properly on the evidence laid out before it. Muslim Mafia should be just what the doctor ordered — an easily readable account of the malaise, written on a level that enables any interested citizen to take their elected officials to account and request them to stop Islamist subversion in our societies.

While CAIR has taken legal action against one of the authors regarding the way the documentation was obtained, it is remarkable that CAIR has not filed suit for libel or defamation, in spite of the book claiming that CAIR is part of a Jihadist network. CAIR, no stranger to litigation against critics, apparently concluded that such a lawsuit had little chance of succeeding.

It hardly needs repeating, but still: If these issues have your interest, get this book and read it!